Speakers tackled public health matters, such as the role of the Health Development Agency, smoking cessation and emergency hormonal contraception, in a community pharmacy session on September 10 that was chaired by Mr Marshall Davies (Vice-President of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society)
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| Discussing public health and community pharmacy: (left to right) Mrs
Karen O’Brien, Miss Melanie Ogden, Mr Marshall Davies, Dr Dawn Milner and Mrs Yve Buckland |
The Health Development Agency (HDA) wants to help make pharmacists’ advice
as effective as possible, to assemble evidence of the profession’s input
into community health and to give pharmacists more of a voice in local strategic
planning, said Mrs YVE BUCKLAND (chairman, HDA).
Community pharmacies were a trusted resource and were unique because both healthy
and ill people visited them. The HDA hoped that pharmacists would become even
more involved in smoking cessation, in dietary and exercise advice and in emergency
contraception. Mrs Buckland described the role of the HDA. The overall aim of
the agency was to improve the health of people in England, particularly by reducing
inequalities in health. Its three main functions were: commissioning research
and drawing together evidence; advising on the setting and implementation of
standards; and advising on training, development and resource needs of those
involved in promoting public health.
The HDA commissioned research to find out what processes and interventions improved
and sustained health, to show how health inequalities could be reduced and to
encourage a “culture of evaluation”.
The agency was involved in ensuring that, for any given activity, initiative
or product, an agreed level of performance was reached. These standards were
then implemented and monitored by the agency. To do this, it was important to
know what standards were already in existence, to incorporate new and existing
standards into all systems and to monitor progress.
Training and development was the third area that the HDA was involved in. It
supported high quality training for all those people working to improve health
and determined the resources needed to implement health improvement initiatives.
The areas that the HDA was working on at the moment included smoking cessation,
inequality in health care provision, children’s health programmes, diet
and nutrition, cancer and coronary heart disease. These were also areas of interest
to community pharmacists.
Community pharmacies were already walk-in or healthy living centres that were
customer-centred because of their business and consequently they had a vital
role to play in improving public health. In the near future, pharmacists would
become more integrated with primary care trusts and would be involved to a greater
extent in setting standards.