While England has seen a “gradual shift” towards making better use of pharmacy teams over the last few years, “innovations have lacked pace and been difficult to spread”, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) suggested in a report published on Wednesday (December 14).

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“ICBs and ICSs, including local authorities, are key to unlocking and enabling these opportunities,” the report’s co-authors – Catherine Picton, Ravi Sharma, and Richard Murray – wrote.

“They need to use a one-system view that connects pharmacy teams from hospital, primary care, general practice, community services, and community pharmacy to each other and to multidisciplinary teams in their wider systems,” they added.

Commissioned by the RPS’s English Pharmacy Board and developed by the King's Fund, the report outlined the professional body’s key ambitions for the sector in England over the next decade.

 

19 key recommendations

 

Developed through consultations with pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, patients, and the wider healthcare system, the report makes 19 recommendations based on six strategic themes:

• Supporting people and communities to live well for longer
• Enabling people to live well with the medicines that they take
• Enhancing patient experience and access to care
• Our pharmacy people
• Data, innovation, science, and research
• Leadership, collaboration, and integration

The 19 short-term goals includes giving pharmacy teams access to patient records and recording their interventions contemporaneously on an electronic health record that all healthcare professionals can see.

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The report also recommends a national “comprehensive pharmacy workforce strategy”, which would oversee pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, pharmacy support staff, and students and trainees.

The pharmacy workforce should also be developed so it is “ready for the large scale roll out of pharmacogenomic testing and personalised prescribing”, the report recommended.

Other goals include allowing pharmacy teams to refer patients directly to other services, “such as diagnostic services, other healthcare professionals, social prescribing or social care”.

This could also happen “the other way round”, the report noted.

 

“A whole-system approach”

 

Commenting on the publication of the report, RPS English Pharmacy Board chair Thorrun Govind said ICSs will be “crucial” to the implementation of the RPS’ ten-year vision.

She said this would “enable the integration of pharmacy with the wider health and care system at a scale which could make a real difference for patients”.

She added: “Realising pharmacy’s potential will depend on a whole-system approach to collaboration and I look forward to working with pharmacy colleagues, the NHS, and stakeholders to create partnerships that can help make this vision a reality.”

Meanwhile, England’s chief pharmaceutical officer, David Webb, welcomed the RPS’s vision “to promote and support the highest standards of professional practice and quality of patient care” as a “welcome development”.

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It comes after a report reviewing how members and elected members engage with the RPS, published in October, found that the body was perceived to be “complex and opaque” and was “not currently getting its communications and engagement right”.

Meanwhile, a report from the UK Commission on Pharmacy Professional Leadership also published in October revealed that just 14% of survey respondents reviewing the development of pharmacy leadership across the UK believe that current arrangements are “completely fit for purpose”.