NHS England (NHSE) national director for primary care Dr Amanda Doyle yesterday (June 11) revealed that GPs will play a central role in the highly anticipated 10-year health plan.
Speaking at the NHS Confed Expo in Manchester, Doyle told delegates that although the plan is “not completely signed off yet”, it will be “very, very GP centric”.
But she added that “primary care is not all about general practice”, stressing that “community pharmacy is increasingly emerging as a key clinical service provider in primary care and we need that to grow”.
Read more: Pharmacies to ‘play key role’ in NHS 10-year plan, says Starmer
“The pharmacy sector feels underwater at the moment and there’s no disputing the challenges around sustainability, but that’s got to drive reform,” Doyle said.
She stressed that the sector has “got to take advantage” of pharmacists’ skills to enable them to become “part of that wider neighbourhood clinical service”.
Both pharmacy minister Stephen Kinnock and NHSE chief pharmaceutical officer (CPhO) David Webb have previously said that pharmacy would play a “key role” and be “critical” to the 10-year plan.
“Value” pharmacists
Doyle told delegates that an understanding must be developed of “the value that pharmacists can bring” to the healthcare system, adding that they are a “resource that we’re not using to the best effect” at the moment.
If the NHS makes “the best use of these experienced clinicians”, it “really could make everybody’s life easier”, she added.
Read more: CPhO: Why pharmacy is critical to the 10 Year Health Plan
Meanwhile, director general of the 10-year health plan Sally Warren told delegates earlier in the day that they should “not expect this document to be planning guidance”.
“This is a government white paper, it is not NHS operational planning guidance,” she stressed.
Warren told delegates that its flagship three shifts – hospital to community, analogue to digital and sickness to prevention - “are not radical”, explaining that it is “delivering the shifts” that will be radical.
“Patient power”
“We have a broadly state-controlled NHS right now and we want to move to a system that is much more patient controlled,” she said.
“That sense of patient power - patients being in the driving seat - is a really, really important North Star for our work in the 10-year plan,” she added.
Read more: NHS 10-year plan: Government ‘lazy and limited’ on prevention
Speaking at the same talk as Doyle, NHSE chair Dr Penny Dash said that the commissioner has set integrated care boards (ICBs) “a pretty significant task” in helping to reform the NHS.
“We are asking them to take the overwhelming bulk of the money and to figure out how we spend that money in the most impactful way to deliver the improvements that we all want to see,” she told delegates.
Read more: Pharmacists urged to ‘submit ideas’ for 10-year plan to ‘fix NHS’
“That does put responsibility on them to contract the neighbourhood health care, to contract for high quality and efficient services and to essentially make the shift” happen, she added.
“It’s not easy...[and] we are sort of placing a bet on ICBs...but I’m really hoping they step up to deliver that,” Dash said.
The 10-year health plan was due to be published in “spring 2025”.
