Pharmacists feeling they have a "hard time" within the NHS are justified, but they fit right into the centre of the reforms, GP and interim chair of NHS Clinical Commissioners Charles Alessi has said.

The reforms marked the end of the "old-fashioned pecking order" and turf wars between GPs and pharmacists as the NHS move to a more "unified system", Dr Alessi told C+D.

"And that unified system means that all local health providers in a community must take responsibility for the local population and that means everyone has a part to play," he said.

"I'm really excited about the opportunities available to [pharmacists]" Charles Alessi, NHS Clinical Commissioners	More on NHS commissioning Local pharmacy service number falls for first time       in six years GPs must avoid conflicts of interest on CCGs Sue Sharpe: An opportunity to prove our worth
	"If you think of who is closest to a population, community pharmacy has a history of being close to a population. Hence... I'm really excited about the opportunities available to them," he said, at the NHS Alliance conference in Bournemouth last week (November 21).

"I think they've had a hard time or feel they've had a hard time, with some justification. They feel they've been excluded. It's not a question of being excluded, it's a question of: this is the new architecture [and] whether they fit within it. And I feel they fit right at the centre of it."

Dr Alessi suggested that pharmacists still needed to be proactive to ensure their services were commissioned by CCGs.

And pharmacists and GPs would need to have "some pretty adult conversations" to ensure the CCG's budget was divided fairly, he added.

"With the amount of resource that's available to our population, clearly the more one gets the less someone else gets and that inevitably is going to lead to tension. The only way to get over that is... dialogue," he said.