Pharmacies’ clinical services offering to expand under NHS 10-year plan

The government has pledged to ‘transition’ community pharmacy from a dispensing-focused service to offering more clinical services, as part of its long-awaited NHS 10-year plan.

Published today, the 168-page blueprint has committed to increasing the role of community pharmacy in the management of long-term conditions, including treatment of obesity, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

While exact details of what this means in practice are thin, the government stressed that pharmacies would have a ‘vital role’ in its plans for a ‘Neighbourhood Health Service’.

‘As well as improving patient choice and convenience, there is now strong evidence that a bigger role for pharmacy can deliver efficiencies and support financial sustainability,’ the plan said.

Over the next five years, the plan has committed to ‘transition community pharmacy from being focused largely on dispensing medicines to becoming integral to the Neighbourhood Health Service, offering more clinical services’.

Given all pharmacists will qualify with a prescribing qualification from 2026, the government said it will ‘increase’ the role of those working in community pharmacies in the ‘management of long-term conditions, complex medication regimes, and treatment of obesity, high blood pressure and high cholesterol’.

It also pledged to give the sector a ‘bigger role in prevention’ by expanding the provision of vaccine delivery and screening in pharmacies.

Pharmacists will be joined up to Single Patient Record

To support the expanded role of community pharmacy, the government said that ‘over time’, the sector will be joined up to its new ‘Single Patient Record’ to ‘help them provide a seamless service’.

The Single Patient Record, set to be introduced by the government, will bring together all a patient’s medical records into one place, according to the plan.

‘Clinicians will be able to securely access it in order to deliver higher quality care – and patients will be able to add their own data from clinically validated wearables,’ it said.

The plan described the record system as a ‘patient passport’ which intends to ‘end many of the frustrations patients told us about in our public engagement’.

‘No more repeated stories. No more appointments where the clinician does not know what happened at the previous one.’

Related Article: Diclofenac eye drops hit by stock shortage

By giving community pharmacies access to the Single Patient Record, the plan suggests that this will also ‘give GPs sight of patient management’.

As reported on Wednesday, the 10-year plan also unveiled the launch of new neighbourhood health centres – to be open 12 hours a day, six days a week and staffed by pharmacists alongside nurses, doctors, social care workers and others.