The government has called on pharmacists to play a key role in the battle against premature death in an effort to save the lives of 30,000 people in England by 2020.   

Community pharmacy was ideally placed to deliver preventative programmes, including NHS health checks, the Department of Health (DH) said in a report this week, which set out plans to reduce the number of deaths from five avoidable diseases: heart disease, cancer, stroke, respiratory and liver disease.

Pharmacists and GPs should also be delivering brief interventions and making the most of the fact that people generally respond well to professional advice, the DH said in the report published on Tuesday (March 5).

"It means a much more aggressive approach to public health and the big killers there, whether its smoking or obesity" Jeremy Hunt, health secretary	More on public health CCGs slow to reach out to LPCs on developing       pharmacy services Obesity-drug scripts fall by a fifth despite growing       overweight population UK must spend £300m on services to avoid being       'fat man' of Europe
	"They [preventative programmes] are essential in identifying risk factors and early diagnosis of illnesses, so that effective treatment and care can have the greatest benefit possible."

There was "considerable scope" for making the NHS health checks programme work better and Public Health England would be considering ways of improving their uptake when local authorities took responsibility for the scheme from April 2013, the report said.    

The quintet of diseases listed above claimed the lives of 150,000 people in England aged under 75 each year and two thirds of those deaths were avoidable, the report said. In 2012, 30 per cent of deaths in the under-75 age range were from cardiovascular disease, according to government figures.  

Announcing the strategy, health secretary Jeremy Hunt said his ambition was to "have the lowest mortality rates in Europe on major killer diseases".

The challenge was significant and "it needs a big change, it means a much more aggressive approach to public health and the big killers there, whether its smoking or obesity", he said.

A C+D poll in November last year revealed that 52 per cent of readers said they felt health checks were good for patients, but 34 per cent said they did not have enough time to deliver them. Thirteen per cent reported a lack of patient interest.

Aston University pharmacy lecturer Joseph Bush told C+D this week that there was "little evidence" to suggest that general health checks reduced all-cause mortality.

"The end result of screening can be an increase in the proportion of an individual's lifespan spent with a disease label rather than an increase in the individual's lifespan," he said.

But Health Diagnostics marketing manager Matthew Mellor, who helps train pharmacists to deliver preventative programmes, said it was essential for pharmacists to be proactive in delivering NHS health checks. "You do have to get down to the pubs and the betting shops and put up posters and be known in the community," he said.

Royal Pharmaceutical Society cardiovascular health expert Helen Williams said treatment needed to be focused on prevention in the community, before patients reached a stage where they needed to be admitted to hospital.

"Now is the time to shift the focus from the acute treatment in hospitals to the prevention and long-term treatment of heart attacks and strokes. This is the new challenge for the NHS and the public."

Do you think more NHS health checks would be effective in driving down premature deaths? Comment below or email us at [email protected] You can also find C+D on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook