Community Pharmacy South West London (SWL) chief executive Amit Patel and Community Pharmacy London chief executive Conor Price have stressed that pharmacists’ “deep clinical knowledge” should be used to support both mental and physical ailments.
The local pharmaceutical committee (LPC) leaders yesterday (June 26) made the comments in an NHS Confederation paper on “reimagining primary care for the next decade”.
Read more: Antidepressants added to NMS from October
Their “vision for 2035” imagined pharmacies being “central to [patients’] health journey”.
“Whether you need urgent advice, routine monitoring, mental health support or help managing a long-term condition, your pharmacy team are your first point of care,” the paper said.
Read more: NHS chief: ‘Everyone’s worried’ about hospital to community shift
It added that in ten years’ time the sector – “now fully digitised and interoperable” – should have “shared care delivery with GPs, dentists, optometrists, mental health teams and social care partners”.
“This is not a fantasy – it is the logical next step in the evolution of the NHS,” it said.
“It is time for community pharmacy to step up and for the system to step forward and meet it,” it added.
“Frontline surveillance”
In their vision for 2035, the LPC leaders said that pharmacies should also offer a range of additional services for the NHS such as “point-of-care diagnostics and prescribing across minor illness, chronic disease, contraception and more”.
Pharmacies should provide “population health analytics, identifying unmet needs and informing system-wide resource planning”, they added.
And they should also offer “frontline surveillance contributing real-time insights to system-wide health intelligence, monitoring trends that serve as early indicators of emerging public health issues”, they said.
Read more: Kinnock ‘shocked’ to find pharmacy is a ‘car crash’
“This is the NHS we must build – one where community pharmacy is no longer a transactional service, but an indispensable health partner,” Patel and Price stressed.
“The profession is ready, the infrastructure is emerging, the need is urgent,” they said.
Mental health moves
In March, the Department of Health and Social Care (DH) and Community Pharmacy England (CPE) announced that antidepressants will be added to the new medicine service (NMS) from October under the 2025/26 funding deal.
The new contract laid out plans to see the NMS expanded to cover depression as part of “the government’s agenda to shift the focus of care from hospitals into the community”, the DH said.
The agenda shifts – hospital to community, analogue to digital and sickness to prevention – are set to be expanded on in the highly anticipated 10-year health plan.
Read more: Primary care leaders warn ‘little capacity’ for community care shift
Earlier this month, NHSE chief executive Sir James Mackey told delegates at the NHS Confed Expo 2025 in Manchester that commissioners are “all worried” about carrying out a neighbourhood care shift.
“We’ve never managed to do it on any scale or for any period, and more often ended up with duplicate costs,” he said at the time.
