The Dispensing Doctors' Association (DDA) has called for pharmacists to assume a wider role in managing patients with long-term conditions.

Pharmacists should receive payment to lead care for stable patients with illnesses such as hypertension and asthma, holding regular consultations to ensure patients had no problems with their medication and their condition had not deteriorated, DDA chief executive Matthew Isom told C+D on Friday (October 31). Pharmacists could refer these patients back to their GP if there were any complications with their care, he said.

Mr Isom's comments came after the DDA's 2015 work plan, unveiled last week (October 29), identified "working with pharmacies on issues of mutual advantage" as the first of its core objectives. 

Partnerships between pharmacies and GP practices – which the DDA hoped clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) would support – would be mutually beneficial, giving pharmacists a more clinical role in patient care and freeing up time for dispensing GPs to deal with more complex cases, Mr Isom said.

He set out plans for the DDA to seek out pharmacists and GPs willing to partner up as it was a "natural, logical" step to work more closely together to improve patient care.

"We can't work in silos. We try to work together because that's how the NHS will thrive and patients will get the best service they need," Mr Isom told C+D.

Dispensing doctors were aware of the sector's strengths and many already employed a community pharmacist, he stressed. "Let's take that one step further: what about certain chronic diseases like hypertension [or] asthma, where there's an obvious role for a community pharmacist working with the practice?" he said.

The partnerships would require meetings between GP practices and pharmacy teams, who would both need access to a shared care record of the patient involved. Until pharmacy had full access to the electronic summary care record, this record would have to be paper-based, Mr Isom said.

But this way of working could not be funded by "slicing bits of the contracts" and it would be a challenge to find a way to pay for them in a "holistic way", he said. Mr Isom added that the DDA had been working with PSNC for over a decade on regulations.

Last week, NHS England announced that pharmacists would form large-scale primary care practices with GPs and other healthcare professionals under "radical" plans to reorganise the NHS over the next five years.  

	What do you think of the DDA's proposals?