The co-owner of an Exmouth pharmacy has won a national innovation award for her work enabling earlier diagnosis of cancer by community pharmacy teams.

Dr Jackie Lewis and her husband Martyn own and run Lewis Pharmacy in Exeter Road, which is also among those currently administering Covid-19 jabs.

She's been recognised for designing the 'Not Normal For You' initiative, in which pharmacy staff learn to identify 'red flag' cancer symptoms among customers, and encourage them to refer themselves for further checks.

Dr Lewis built on her local relationships with Cancer Research UK, Macmillan, Devon Local Pharmaceutical Committee and Cancer Alliance to design the service during 2019 and 2020.

She gained grants from the Health Education Foundation and the National Pharmacy Association, and the 'Not Normal For You' scheme was successfully evaluated in 10 East Devon pharmacies.

After the results were presented to professional oncological associations, she was awarded funding by Pfizer to develop e-learning materials for other pharmacy teams.

She has now won the Innovation category of the Independent Pharmacy Awards, presented in a virtual ceremony, and in her acceptance speech she said her ultimate aim is to have national recognition and uptake of her initiative.

'Cancer diagnoses being missed during Covid pandemic'

Dr Lewis, who worked in the hospital sector and academia before setting up the Exmouth pharmacy, said: "I think it's become more important than ever because of the coronavirus situation, because cancer diagnoses are being potentially missed.

"We as a pharmacy are seeing patients that clearly should be seeing their GPs, we've almost become a minor injury service ourselves, and I just think the 'Not Normal For You' work is really, really relevant.

"I really would like someone to take this project and run with it; we've kept it off patents and intellectual property rights so that someone could take it up if they wanted to.

"The e-learning that I'm doing is for the whole community pharmacy team, and it's going to be free and easily accessible, and that really could help community pharmacies to diagnose cancer early."

The challenges of running the pharmacy during Covid

During her acceptance speech, Dr Lewis also talked about the 'roller-coaster' aspect of running the pharmacy throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

She said: "We do get a lot of scripts through and then a lot of directions, so its been trying to keep on top of those, trying to keep the pharmacy safe.

"We actually took on extra dispensing for someone who closed in the area as well, so that was 'interesting'.

"Just trying to keep everyone safe, trying to keep the business open, and one really good thing is that our sons have worked with us for several months when they were off school, so that was really amazing."

But she said there were very difficult times too:

"We got really, really tired early on, especially at Easter, and the NHS kept asking us to open on every bank holiday and that was really hard, and all we needed was a day off and that was probably one of the lowest points.

"I feel that we're much, much more resilient now we're used to it, it's amazing what the human mind and body gets used to, I think."

On winning the award, she said it "It's fantastic to be recognised by the profession, and for my work to be recognised as well. There's been many many years on this work to get to this stage, so I'm delighted."