EXCLUSIVE

Former NPA chief executive Mike Holden has said he was disappointed by the “lack of passion” for community pharmacy in a think tank’s report on the sector.

The Nuffield Trust’s report, published last week, had an “unnecessary focus” on primary care pharmacists and a lack of engagement with community pharmacists, Mr Holden told C+D on Friday (December 12).

The Now More Than Ever report was commissioned by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) to look at whether the recommendations for an expanded care-giving role for pharmacists, set out in the RPS’s Now or Never report in 2013, had been acted upon a year later. The report's authors concluded that, while pharmacists had managed to persuade some local commissioners to fund innovative services, progress across England remained “patchy and lacking in scale”.

Mr Holden, who stood down as NPA chief executive in October, said the report was “a little underwhelming”. Pharmacy bodies needed to “agitate a little bit more” to progress the sector’s potential public health role, he said.

“The prevention agenda has to be a major piece of work for future governments to take forward, because if they don’t prevent people getting ill or stop them getting worse it will never balance the budget. I’d like to hear more from representative bodies on that role rather than just talking about medicines,” he said.

In its report, the Nuffield Trust said that, despite a growing role for pharmacists in emergency care and within general practices, community pharmacy in particular needed "significant change". The pharmacy contract should shift its focus away from medicines dispensing and towards making "care-givers" to send out a "powerful signal" to the sector that the model of care had to change, the report's authors said.

The “complex” commissioning arrangements that pharmacy had to operate under appeared to “support the status quo and inhibit innovation”, the authors said. They cited divisions between the national pharmacy representative groups as preventing the sector from making a "coherent case" to the wider health service. 

What else could pharmacy bodies do to raise the sector’s profile?

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