Pharmacists should play a major role in educating patients to be come experts in the conditions they suffered from, according to the author of a new report on "The expert patient", published by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry on March 27.
Mr John Illman told a meeting of the Health and Medical Public Relations Association on March 22 that his report concluded that there was a need for "education, education, education" for the patient. Pharmacists had a major role to play in this, but for years and years they had not exploited the opportunities available to them.
Mr Illman said that education on health matters should be available in schools, pharmacies, doctors' surgeries, community centres and through the new healthy living centres which were springing up all over the country.
One of the themes of his report was that patients were not expert enough. Few patients knew what all the different information available on the internet was about or which sites were the good ones and which bad. His report recommended that patients should be taught these skills in the places he had mentioned.

Educating expert patients - a role for pharmacists