Pharmacists should be given financial incentives to encourage them to work with GPs to promote healthy living initiatives and educate patients on topics such as exercise, Lloydspharmacy pharmacy director Andy Murdock has said.

Following a Royal College of Physicians report that suggested GPs could be offered financial incentives to give exercise advice to patients, Mr Murdock called for a broader approach to promoting healthy living.

"Community pharmacy has a key role to play alongside and in support of, our GP colleagues," he said. "In practice, many people who should be taking more exercise do not think of themselves as being ill and therefore do not think they need to see their GP. Yet these are the kind of people who regularly visit their local community pharmacy."

"Community pharmacy has a key role to play alongside, and in support of, our GP colleagues" Andy Murdock, Lloydspharmacy

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Mr Murdock said in areas such as public health promotion, the NHS financial framework should support joint working between healthcare professionals."We should be collaborating for patient outcomes, not competing for incomes," he said. Community pharmacies could use interventions with patients to "act as a gatekeeper for GP surgeries", encouraging healthy living among those without conditions and identifying those with conditions who would need to see their doctor, he said.

Pharmacy Voice chief executive Rob Darracott said Mr Murdock had been "spot on" to raise the importance of collaboration and to point out that people often visited pharmacies for non-healthcare reasons. "If every contact is to count, then we should count the contacts in community pharmacy," he said.

The comments were backed by PSNC, which agreed that pharmacies and GPs should offer a "complementary package" of healthcare to patients.

However, PSNC head of NHS services Alastair Buxton said the pharmacy contract meant that pharmacists "already have the opportunity to provide advice on exercise" to people with a number of medical conditions. "Better use of those opportunities by the commissioning board [in the reformed NHS] could see positive results," he suggested.