Pharmacists cost 70 per cent more than GPs to provide chronic pain management and yield the same results, a study has suggested.

Pharmacist prescribing interventions cost an average of £77.55 per person and reviews cost £54.67, while a single GP review cost £45.90, found the research, published in the BMJ last week (April 1).

The study, conducted on 125 patients across six GP practices, found little difference in quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) between the patients receiving pharmacist versus GP-led care.

Its authors, led by a health economist at the University of Aberdeen, stressed that the small size of the randomised controlled trial meant the results were "highly uncertain", and called for a larger study of at least 460 patients.

They also highlighted that patients treated by pharmacist prescribers had shown “particular” improvement in their chronic pain grades.

Researchers calculated the costs by taking into account how much was spent on the intervention itself, pharmacist training, and the number of other interventions needed such as hospital inpatient days. Outcomes were measured through patient questionnaires given at the first intervention, and three months and six months afterwards.

The authors found the cost of training pharmacists to prescribe was £10.85 per patient, while the cost of the pharmacist prescribing intervention was estimated to be £66.70. The cost of training pharmacists to provide a review was £10.67 and the intervention itself cost £44.

An estimated 11 per cent of adults in the UK suffer from severe chronic pain, which is equal to around 4.5 million people. 
 

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