GP leaders from local medical committees (LMCs) last week (November 22) voted in favour of pharmacy blood pressure checks being “terminated with immediate effect and the money put into pharmacy dispensing fees” instead.
The motion was “overwhelmingly carried”, British Medical Association (BMA) officials said.
Read more: GPs to vote on ‘immediate’ end to pharmacy blood pressure checks
Speaking in favour of the motion, representative of Mid Mersey LMC Rebecca Williamson said that by “failing to fund general practice” and “outsourcing” services to other providers, “more work” was being generated for GPs.
“Patient demand has led to knee-jerk reactions to enable, encourage and expect community pharmacies to assess patients without the knowledge and information needed to treat them appropriately,” she added.
“Race to the bottom”
The successful motion – which was voted through in full at the BMA annual conference of England LMC representatives on Friday (November 22) – means it will now become official BMA policy.
Representative of Devon LMC – who proposed the motion – Victoria Taylor-St Ruth said that “we cannot afford a race to the bottom” between GPs and community pharmacies.
She called for the general practitioners committee (GPC)to “fully assess and understand the workload Pharmacy First takes away from GPs, as well as the workload that boomerangs back to GPs”.
Read more: Pharmacy group urges BMA to reject ‘short-sighted’ GP vote on pharmacy BP checks
“The general practitioners committee (GPC) must continue to fight to restore the core for GPs,” she said.
And she stressed that NHS England should “[stop] pitting GPs and community pharmacy against each other”.
Williamson acknowledged that “pharmacies are being stretched thinner and thinner” between different services and called for them to be “properly paid” for their dispensing services”.
Read more: BMA’s top GP warns budget will ‘break’ pharmacies – but less than GPs
The motion also demanded that NHS England (NHSE) funds community pharmacies’ “core work of dispensing appropriately”.
It stressed that “the increasing tendency of NHSE to pit general practice and community pharmacy against each other in zero-sum games for scant funding” must come to an end.
And it called for the Pharmacy First service to “follow guidelines on prescribing and ensure appropriate antibiotic stewardship”.
“Immediately discontinue” Pharmacy First
Representative of Cambridgeshire LMC Eimear Byrne, however, spoke against this motion and called for Pharmacy First to be “immediately discontinued and the funding redirected into core general practice”.
She criticised the “outrageous cost of the scheme” and the “reduction in continuity of care with GP teams”, adding that “there is no persuasive evidence to fund this scheme”.
“Unlike GPs, pharmacies have retail licenses – their motives are not purely patient focused,” Byrne claimed.
“They directly profit from recommendations they make to a captive, vulnerable audience,” she added.
Read more: NHSE relaunches Pharmacy First marketing campaign with ‘minor revisions’
Independent Pharmacies Association (IPA) chief executive Dr Leyla Hannbeck said that the vote was “deeply regrettable and massively disappointing”.
“The BMA has passed a motion that seems in favour of reducing patient access to vital healthcare and pharmacy services,” she said.
“The solution to the NHS crisis lies in the government adopting a joined-up approach to funding and planning primary care, with community pharmacies and GPs at its heart working collaboratively,” she added.
But instead, “we have a situation where GPs are being pitted against pharmacies, ultimately leaving patients to lose out,” Hannbeck said.