The survey is part of a three-year programme of research into obesity prevention, a strand of which is to find out more about the role of health professionals in providing healthy lifestyle advice during their everyday practice.

“We want to send out a questionnaire to all healthcare professionals who might have the opportunity to provide lifestyle advice,” Christopher Keyworth, research associate at Manchester University's centre for health psychology told C+D last Thursday (February 23).

The aim of the survey is to gain an understanding as to whether pharmacy professionals are providing lifestyle advice, what sort of advice they are offering, and if any barriers are stopping it from happening, Dr Keyworth explained.

“We want to know what’s going on and what we can do to help – are there any obvious training needs?” he said. “We want to identify things [the University of Manchester] could do – perhaps adding to programmes that currently exist.”

The programme of research is funded by Tesco, but Dr Keyworth stressed the supermarket chain will remain “hands off” during the project.

“We want to use the findings to build something bigger and roll it out more widely, so research grants and programmes could [result] from this," he said.