Scaling up collaboration across primary care will be a ‘phenomenal challenge’

Scaling up local collaboration between pharmacy and general practice will be a ‘phenomenal challenge’, a pharmacy leader has said.

The chair of the Scottish Pharmacy Advisory Council at the Royal College of Pharmacy (RCPharm), Catriona Sinclair, said she was ‘not convinced’ primary care has a shared vision, which will make it difficult to scale up collaboration.

Speaking at the inaugural Community Pharmacy & General Practice conference today, she told delegates: ‘One of the challenges we have is defining the intentional journey that we're trying to go on.

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‘Everybody's got their own small journeys, and that is difficult to scale up. That's difficult to scale up in Scotland, where we only have five million people. How you do that with 10 times the population and bureaucracy is a phenomenal challenge.

‘We can only start if we’re all in it together, but I'm not convinced we’re anywhere near having that shared intentional vision. At some point we need to get that because we need to make a first step, and the sooner the better in this time of great change.’

Ms Sinclair also said that leading organisations across primary care – such as the recently-launched RCPharm – must be ‘enablers’ of that collaboration and shared vision.

NHS England’s Chief pharmaceutical officer David Webb, who was chairing the panel, said that local ‘trust and confidence’ was important for improving collaboration, but added that ‘professional bodies also have a role to play’.

He asked delegates to consider one thing they can do in their practice to facilitate closer working with their primary care neighbours.

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Victoria Tzortziou Brown, chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP), told delegates that GPs and pharmacists need to get to know each other better to understand their 'unique strengths' and build trust.

She said: ‘I think the first thing that we need to do is get to know each other better because then we can understand our unique strengths. This means we can start trusting each other more.

‘Enablers should include shared records where it adds value, aligned incentives, and robust evaluation so that we understand where these new models of care are valued, and also any unintended consequences.’

However, she cautioned that ‘we need to do this carefully’ without undermining patient trust.

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The panel also discussed the need for pharmacies and GPs to work together to improve medication adherence, which costs the NHS millions every year.

And they stressed the need for more ‘holistic care’ in neighbourhoods as opposed to transactional care.