Lord Philip Hunt (Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health) has made a commitment full use of community pharmacy in the modern National Health Service.
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Lord Hunt: Government shares your views |
Community pharmacists had a very important role to play in that agenda and the Government was determined to ensure that they could play that role to the full. The Government's agenda was straightforward - to improve people's health, to extend years of healthy life, to close the gap between the better off and the worst off in society and to modernise the NHS, to drive up quality and to make the service more responsive to the people who depended on it.
Referring to health improvement targets, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, the Commission for Health Improvement, and national service frameworks (NSFs), the Minister said that the Government was setting clear standards and goals for tackling the most important health issues.
Earlier this month, the Government had published an NSF for coronary heart disease which set out how heart care would be expanded and reformed with community-based smoking cessation clinics, registers of at risk patients, faster access to treatment, 700 defibrillators in public places, faster ambulance response times, fast-track chest pain clinics and more heart operations. Because this was a blueprint for the whole NHS, this was as relevant for pharmacy as for all professions. The required standards would not be achieved without pharmacy input.
The Minister was sure that community pharmacists would seize the opportunities presented to reinforce people's commitment to give up smoking and that general medical practitioners would be looking for help and advice from skilled pharmacists to help them meet new standards for prescribing aspirin, beta-blockers and statins.
It had been no coincidence that the PSNC had chosen heart disease as the focus for its proposed medicines management trial. The proposal was being looked at very seriously.
Commenting on health improvement plans, primary care groups and trusts, NHS Direct, and similar developments, Lord Hunt said that these provided tremendous opportunities for pharmacists. PCGs had quickly recognised the need for good advice on prescribing and medicines and local pharmaceutical committees were actively involved in planning NHS walk-in centres.
However, he warned that the profession's involvement would depend on how well it adapted to the pace of change in the NHS. Pharmacy needed to continue to show itself capable of working at local level, of being part of the wider team and, above all, of being flexible. This applied as much to large multiples as it did to those who owned and managed their own premises.
Medicines were a crucial part of the health service, the Minister said. To be serious about modernising the NHS it was necessary to look hard at how medicines were used and how they reached their end users.
At one end of the scale was self-care. The Government wanted empowered patients with access to authoritative information and the chance to purchase a wide range of over-the-counter medicines. That was why the winter publicity campaign "Choose the right remedy" had placed so much emphasis on pharmacies as the first port of call.
"I want to take this opportunity to thank you and your colleagues for the tremendous amount work that you put into it and the tremendous success of this campaign which showed very clearly the potential of community pharmacist in the future," Lord Hunt told his audience.
Having been to many PSNC dinners, the Minister, who had previously been director of the National Association of Health Authorities and its successor the National Association of Health Authorities and Trusts, said that the message that had been preached year after year after year had got through. Community pharmacists were a unique resource, accessible and waiting to be used. The Government believed that. That was why it had encouraged the public to turn to pharmacies.
"'Ask your pharmacist' is a message we are very happy not only to endorse but to promote," Lord Hunt said.
OTC sales would never replace prescription medicines, the Minister went on. There would continue to be demand, almost certainly a growing demand, for dispensing services. Those service needed to keep pace with changing expectations. The public had growing expectations of high quality services which were available when and where it was convenient to them. Community pharmacy had an important role here. It needed continually to test whether it was delivering what the public deserved and expected. Questions that could be asked included: was fast and efficient dispensing properly and routinely accompanied by the right level of counselling to ensure that patients understood how to use their medicines effectively; were there sufficiently good and easily accessible pharmacy services; and what role did the internet and electronic data interchange have to play in the future. Modernisation meant tackling questions like these and seeing them as opportunities rather than threats.
Outlining actions that the Government intended to take to implement aspects of the Crown report (PJ, Mar 18, p424), Lord Hunt said that, because pharmacists were experts on medicines, they held an important place within the proposed changes. These included supplementary prescribing with possible development as independent prescribers.
Finally, in the light of last year's problems with supplies of generic medicines, the Minister said that he was determined that the NHS would not be "ripped off" by anyone in the supply chain again.
Thanking pharmacists for their efforts to ensure that patients did not suffer when supplies were difficult to obtain, the Minister warned: "We will not tolerate resources that ought to be used to provide a better and more modern NHS being diverted elsewhere. If changes are necessary in the way medicines are supplied to the NHS, we will have no hesitation at all in making them."