A rapid realist review of community pharmacy support for the public health agenda during the COVID-19 pandemic and future health emergencies

Background: Community pharmacy has a key role in the battle against COVID-19, for example vaccination, dispensing medicines and giving advice. This project uses an approach called "realist review". This is ideal to make sense of complex situations and understand how community pharmacy can support the challenges presented by COVID-19. From this, guidance will be produced.

Planned Methods: We will learn lessons from what has already been written by studying academic papers and other documents. We will aim to find documents with information on how community pharmacy can support the current challenges of COVID-19. From this we will work out 'what works for whom, when, how and why?' and develop guidance.

Our learning from the literature will be discussed with patients and care staff including pharmacy, care home staff, and GPs and their colleagues ("key stakeholders"). These stakeholders will advise us whether our findings make sense and help us to develop guidance that works in the "real world".

Dissemination (sharing our findings): We will share our findings and suggestions with patients, policy-makers, community pharmacy and GPs. We will work with key professional bodies to rapidly share our guidelines.

Background: Community pharmacy has a key role in the current COVID-19 pandemic; this includes mass vaccination, medication supply and providing advice. A realist review is ideally suited to making sense of complex situations such as how community pharmacy can most effectively support the challenges presented by COVID-19. This rapid realist review will use secondary data with input from key stakeholders.

Aim: To understand how and when community pharmacy can effectively support the public health agenda in during pandemics such as COVID-19.

Method:
The realist review contains six stages to develop the programme theory:
1. Focussing the research question to identify key priorities, such as supporting mass vaccination.
2. Developing initial programme theory, a 'rough and ready' explanation for what needs to be done, by whom, how and why, and in what contexts.
3. Developing the search strategy, to rapidly identify academic literature from relevant databases.
4. Selection and appraisal of documents based on rigour and relevance.
5. Data analysis/synthesis to develop and refine the programme theory.
6. Data from the analysis will be used to identify: mechanisms that need to be 'triggered', and related contexts so that community pharmacy can support the public health agenda. Practice guidance, underpinned by the programme theory, will be produced.

Key stakeholder input on the initial and evolving programme theory, and the guidance developed will be obtained.

Dissemination: Results will be shared with patients, policy-makers and clinicians. Guidelines will be rapidly disseminated via established and evolving links with key professional bodies.