EXCLUSIVE

Funding for community pharmacy should be merged with other health professions, the chair of the all-party pharmacy group (APPG) has said.

The NHS needed to integrate the budgets across primary, acute and social care to encourage co-operation between professionals, Labour MP and APPG chair Sir Kevin Barron told C+D in an exclusive interview.

Separate budgets were "holding back" Labour's vision of "whole person care", in which the government would combine the overall funding for health and social care , Sir Kevin said at the Labour conference on Tuesday (September 23).  

"The only way you're going to bring [health and social care] together is to bring the budgets together. Different aspects of health and social care pride themselves on how much budget they've got, we've got to get rid of that thinking," he said.

A report commissioned by the Labour party earlier this year recommended that primary care should be commissioned locally rather than nationally, and Sir Kevin told C+D that pharmacists could "absolutely" assist with these plans if they were properly rewarded for delivering local services.

"It will have to be seen that [pharmacists] benefit, that way you incentivise the system that puts the patient first in all areas of primary care," he said.

A Labour government would also have to "get the interface right" between pharmacists and GPs by addressing problems with the electronic prescription service and giving pharmacists access to patient records, he added.

Last year, NHS Alliance claimed that most GPs thought it was a "no-brainer" to align their contract with pharmacy's.

	Should pharmacy's funding be merged with that of other healthcare professionals?