The latest travel trends data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that UK residents have got back in the swing of international travel, making 71.0 million visits overseas in 2022, compared with 19.1 million trips in 2021.

As travellers dust off their passports and venture abroad, perhaps for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, this opens up opportunities for community pharmacies to refresh their travel health services.

 

Appropriate travel health and travel advice 

 

Specialist pharmacist independent prescriber, Alex Leung, is head of education and training at healthcare technology, travel health training and patient group direction (PGD) provider Voyager Medical. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health (FRSPH), and the head of travel medicine and allergy services at five GP surgeries and pharmacies.

“Travel health is a vital service to be able to offer pharmacy customers because it’s about preventative medicine,” says Mr Leung. “But to do so appropriately involves more than just assessing yourself as competent to sign off your own training.”

While the requirement for basic life support training is that it is repeated once a year, vaccination training can be updated less often, so Mr Leung stresses pharmacists should consider refreshing this every two years. “If you don’t, then you won’t know what you don’t know,” he points out. “An important point of refresher training is to also help you protect yourself from potential liability if something goes wrong as well.”

Keeping updated is also useful when it comes to helping patients understand new travel health risks and treatments – and the recent news of the world’s first ever malaria vaccine developed by the Jenner Institute at Oxford University and Serum Institute of India is a good example of this.

Although it is not yet available in the UK, Mr Leung says news of the vaccine has prompted questions from patients in his travel health clinic. “We’ve told our patients that we haven’t received an official briefing on the vaccine yet,” he says. “But I think it's a very positive step because it will eventual give patients another means of preventing malaria when they travel”.

 

Running a successful pharmacy travel clinic

 

According to Mr Leung, taking time to find out the expectations of the patient is the key to a successful travel health consultation.

“I know some travel health clinics treat it like a money making opportunity, but there would never be a situation where I’d tell someone they must – or must not – take something,” he says. “Instead, you need to tell them the risk is high or low, and then advise them to consider the appropriate vaccines.

“For example, if they plan to ride a motorcycle in a developing country, that comes with a chance of injury – so they should consider having a hepatitis B vaccination because if they have a serious accident and need to receive a blood transfusion, there is a risk that about 2% of the blood will be infected by hepatitis B.”

This gives the patient the responsibility for being accountable, but at the same time Mr Leung adds: “They can't be self-accountable without the support from travel health specialist to give them the right advice and signposting them to the right information.”

Another, perhaps surprising, tool for success is what Mr Leung calls his “travel clinic secret weapon”, and that’s aiming for painless injections. “Low pain is the gold standard of the injection techniques I teach,” he says. “Studies show that patients do not want to come for vaccinations for two reasons. One is vaccine hesitancy, and there's nothing much we can do about that as it is related to their trust in the vaccines’ manufacturers. But the other reason is actually the pain of injections, and that is something we can definitely address through our technique.”

 

Benefits to the patient and the pharmacy 

 

While Mr Leung sees a number of patients who have done their best to research their travel destination and the health precautions they need to take, he says the majority of people don’t know anything about the requirements, or have got their information from unreliable sources and are adamant that it’s correct.

“This is where pharmacy travel health specialists are so important,” he explains. “Even if 50% of what the patient has found out for themselves is correct, that still leaves 50% that could be the crucial part that is missing and lead to serious health consequences.”

Of course, a well-run travel health clinic can be financially rewarding as well. But Mr Leung says it’s the professional clinical satisfaction that he enjoys. “On a Saturday, I run a travel clinic in north London and about 40% of my patients are returning customers, with 60% who are new patients,” he says.

He adds: “It’s great when you're able to support patients who you have been seeing in a normal pharmacy setting when they go on holiday, and when they start sharing their excitement about their holiday, it makes your day much more enjoyable.”

PP-UK-MLF-0403 October 2023