The Royal Society for Public Health (RPSH)  has praised England's healthy living pharmacy (HLP) initiative has been praised by as an example of successfully placing health champions into community settings.

The RSPH said the initiative had "yielded positive results" and offered "greater exposure" of these champions to the public, in a report arguing for further investment into the wider public health workforce.

It pointed to the HLP programme's 98 per cent patient satisfaction rate and the success of HLP weight loss and smoking cessation services as proof that the initiative was "very popular", in the report published yesterday (June 23).

"With 84 per cent of adults visiting a pharmacy at least once a year, there is clear potential for HLPs to impact unhealthy behaviour," the RSPH said.

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	The RSPH called for local authorities to recognise the importance of all health champions – working in either the community or the workplace - in their strategic documents. Less than a fifth of local authorities currently referenced health champions in their joint strategic needs assessments (JSNAs), the RSPH said.

The public health body also looked at the success of the NHS's Making Every Contact Count initiative as well as the Department of Health's health trainer service, which recruits individuals to provide health advice in their communities. It called for further research into the value and cost-effectiveness of these initiatives and the role of health champions.

RSPH chief executive Shirley Cramer said the transfer of responsibility for public health over to local government as part of last year's commissioning reforms last year offered a "unique opportunity" to encourage the "non-traditional workforce" to promote healthier lives.

"The weight of evidence points to the huge potential of the ‘wider workforce' to improve healthy behaviour and reduce inequalities. We simply can't afford not to develop and make better use of this workforce," she said.

NHS Portsmouth launched the HLP iniative in 2010 and there are now more than 800 HLPs and 2,500 health champions in England, according to figures released by the National Pharmacy Association (NPA) in May.

Earlier this month, NPA chief executive Mike Holden told C+D he would have liked to see more HLPs and a greater role for pharmacy in public health by this point, but the NHS reforms had caused "delays in opportunities" to expand the scheme.

The same week, Public Health England (PHE) promised to enable "swifter progress" of the HLP model by investing more staff and administrative assistance to "further support the roll-out" of the initiative.

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