Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust’s Pharmacy Team won the oral presentation award for their newly developed Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), at the international College of Mental Health Pharmacy (CMHP) Conference.

The Trust’s Pharmacy Team received the oral presentation award at the 8th international CMHP Conference for their work in developing an in-house virtual learning community for mental health pharmacists enabling them to share knowledge in order to improve care.

The team recognised that pharmacists working in isolation had limited opportunity to exchange knowledge and ideas and decided to develop the programme to enable senior pharmacists to share their knowledge with junior pharmacists. Regular face to face sessions were not a feasible option and therefore an online Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) was developed using free open source Moodle© software. The tool provides staff with the ability to take part in peer to peer learning, collaborative tasks and discussion forums and allow access to formative feedback from senior peers.

Lisa Ainsworth, Medicines Management Education and Training Lead at Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust said:
“It was an honour to be chosen to speak at such a prestigious event and share the innovative work the Pharmacy team has been involved in. I was delighted to win best oral presentation as the calibre of the other presentations was very high.
“The creation of the Virtual Learning Environment has allowed for the sharing of clinical expertise within the team which ultimately leads to improved patient care and experience for those accessing our services.
This year’s event theme was 'A Wider Perspective' and looked at how mental health can be affected by outside influences such as physical health and took place from 13 October to 15