Pharmacy should increasingly be seen at the front line of the National Health Service, and not in the back room, in the view of the chief medical officer at the Department of Health, Professor Liam Donaldson.
Speaking at a dinner of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society's Leicestershire branch on March 17, Professor Donaldson said that pharmacists had traditionally been thought of as in support of service delivery. But that traditional thinking should be turned on its head, and the pharmacist should be one of the entry points of a modern health service.
One example of what was happening already was pharmacists' involvement in prescribing support and medicines management. Pharmacy in a New Age provided another example. And the Department's winter campaign had shown how big a part pharmacists could play in taking pressure off hospital services. Community pharmacies should be seen as "the NHS on the high street".
Turning to standards of professional practice, Professor Donaldson said that when things went wrong in health care, they received wide media coverage, and people worried that such problems might only be the tip of the iceberg. The concept of clinical governance had been introduced to try to reduce such adverse outcomes of care and provide higher quality in the NHS. As well as addressing clinical governance in their own field, pharmacists could be of great help to good clinical governance of doctors and clinical teams.

Liam Donaldson: "the NHS on the high street"