A Department of Health and Social Care (DH) campaign to “raise awareness of high blood pressure” and to “encourage those eligible to get checked for free at their local pharmacy” resulted in thousands more people using the service, health minister Ashley Dalton revealed last week.
The campaign launched in March 2024 and saw “50,046 more people” get “life-saving blood pressure checks than in the same period the previous year”, representing a 42% uplift, she said.
And the following month, there were 76,627 more checks – an uplift of 66%, she added.
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The comment came in a written response to a parliamentary question from Conservative MP for Skipton and Ripon Julian Smith.
Smith had asked what assessment had been made “of the effectiveness of public awareness campaigns on hypertension”.
He also questioned whether there were “plans to introduce additional measures to encourage regular blood pressure monitoring amongst adults”.
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In her response, Dalton explained that the 2024 campaign ran for three weeks with advertising on “television, video-on-demand, social media and on poster sites near to pharmacies”.
Following this, “visits to the NHS pharmacy look-up tool increased by over 967% and there were 117,546 visits to the tool over the campaign period”, she said.
This was “compared to 12,154 in the three weeks prior to the campaign launch”, she added.
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Dalton also said that the DH “continues to invest heavily in the community pharmacy hypertension service”.
“Since October 2021, pharmacies have delivered nearly 4.2 million blood pressure and ambulatory blood pressure monitoring checks,” she noted.
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It comes after Community Pharmacy England (CPE) revealed in September that the requirement to provide one ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) consultation per month as part of the “bundling” requirements to achieve a Pharmacy First fixed monthly payment will be “delayed”.
The negotiator said it had agreed with the DH and NHS England (NHSE) that the bundling requirement “will not go ahead from October 1 as originally planned” - but it remains unclear when the change will come into force.
