The drive to move pharmacy away from a medicines supply role has made “disappointing” progress over the past year, think tank the Nuffield Trust has said.

The sector must “seize the opportunities on offer” or its future over the next decade “looked bleak”, the think tank warned in its report on how attitudes to pharmacy have changed since November 2013.

The report, commissioned by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) and published today (December 10), looked 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 on 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”.

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.

If pharmacy leaders did not put themselves at the centre of local and national healthcare planning, the sector risked being “overtaken by the inevitable expansion of technology-driven dispensing and supply”, the authors stressed. NHS policy-makers also needed to show they “meant business” and provide national funding that enabled pharmacists to become care-givers, the think tank said.

Judith Smith, Nuffield Trust director of policy and the report’s lead author, said there had been an “increased understanding that pharmacy has a lot to offer an NHS on an urgent hunt for savings”.

“But we are still not on course for [pharmacy] to become a care-giving profession in the way [it] should. In most areas, there just hasn’t been a change patients would notice,” she added.

In its Now or Never report, the RPS pointed to the government’s Better Care Fund (BCF), a £3.8 billion sum set aside to make health and social care more integrated, as an opportunity for pharmacy to realise its potential for helping reduce medicines-related hospital admissions and pharmaceutical errors in care homes. But the Nuffield Trust said many local BCF plans still contained “relatively little new roles” for pharmacy in residential and domiciliary care.

However, it noted that pharmacy did have a “significant role” in some of the BCF plans that had been “fast-tracked” by the Department of Health because they were considered to be the most advanced.

The report’s authors also found evidence that the sector was now seen as “part of the solution” to the winter pressures on hospitals and A&E services. While they could not identify a “clear trend” of newspapers publishing more discussions about pharmacy, there was an “encouraging” rise in the number of references to the sector in parliamentary debates, they added.

Do you think attitudes to pharmacy have changed in the past year? 

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