Talk about being spoilt for choice. In the past eight months, the Department of Health has received not one, but three strategy documents from national pharmacy organisations. Each of them has offered viable ways that the role of pharmacists can be strengthened and expanded.

In April, the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC) responded to the threat of a cut to the sector’s funding in England – which is now very much a reality – by setting out a range of counter-proposals. Of these, the negotiator’s suggestion that pharmacists receive a fee each time they assess whether a patient actually needs a medicine proved the most popular option with C+D readers.

Four months later, PSNC joined forces with Pharmacy Voice and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) to publish a Forward View document calling for pharmacies to be recognised as “neighbourhood health and wellbeing hubs”, among other roles.

And now one of the proposals in that document – supporting individuals with long-term conditions – has been expanded upon in a new report, delivered to parliament by the RPS this week. Pharmacy minister David Mowat has labelled the report “timely”. He points out that a review of community pharmacy services, commissioned by NHS England and conducted by King’s Fund director of policy Richard Murray, is due out by the end of the year.

We already know that the Murray Review is tasked with – in the words of Mr Mowat – “reforming” pharmacy services. If that sounds ominous, perhaps it should do. After all, the minister promoted the £113 million cut to funding in England as a way to “simplify” pharmacy’s “outdated payment structure”.

Yet the Royal Society for Public Health used its own report on Tuesday to argue that there is a “strong feeling” among both pharmacists and commissioners that the sector is being underutilised. With the government announcing details this week of the consultation fee pharmacists will receive for taking part in its emergency supply pilot scheme, the appetite is clearly there to pay pharmacists to better use their skills.

So if there’s the slightest chance that the RPS’s report will help the government decide to genuinely reform pharmacy services – to the benefit of the sector, and not just the Department of Health’s purse strings – then I’m all for it.

James Waldron is editor of C+D. Email him at [email protected] or contact him on Twitter at @CandDJamesW