Mapping the terrain: a conceptual schema for a mental health medication support intervention in community pharmacy
Abstract
Objective: Mental health–related problems pose a serious issue for primary care, and community pharmacy could make a
significant contribution, but there is a dearth of information.
Methods: This article reports synthesis of the literature on mental health interventions across a range of pharmacy models,
and pharmacy services in contexts beyond mental health. To best inform the design of a community pharmacy medication
support intervention for mental health consumers, the literature was reported as a conceptual schema and subsequent
recommendations for development, implementation and evaluation of the service. A broad conceptualisation was taken in
this review. In addition to mental health and community pharmacy literature, policy/initiatives, organisational culture and
change management principles, and evaluative processes were reviewed. Key words were selected and literature reviews
undertaken using EMBASE, PubMed, CINAHL and Web of Science.
Results: Recommendations were made around: medication support intervention design, consumer recruitment,
implementation in community pharmacy and evaluation. Surprisingly, there is a scarce literature relating to mental health
interventions in community pharmacy. Even so, findings from other pharmacy models and broader medicines management for
chronic illness can inform development of a medication support service for mental health consumers. Key learnings include
the need to expand medicines management beyond adherence with respect to both intervention design and evaluation.
Conclusion: The conceptual framework is grounded in the need for programmes to be embedded within pharmacies that
are part of the health system as a whole.
Journal Title
Sage Open Medicine
Volume
3
Copyright Statement
© 2015 This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use,
reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open
Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Subject
Clinical Pharmacy and Pharmacy Practice