Pharmacy in community and primary care must develop together, Leeds academics say
Community and primary care pharmacy services need to be developed in a more integrated way, academics from the University of Leeds say.
In an article in the Health Policy journal, Jonathan Silcock, Theo Raynor
and Duncan Petty of the university’s pharmacy practice and medicines
management group say: “Traditional community pharmacy faces many
problems unless it can learn to develop alongside primary care pharmacy.”
The authors call primary care pharmacy an unplanned consequence of health
policy development in the 1990s. They note the involvement of primary
care pharmacists in budget management and overall prescribing quality
while community pharmacies have been sucked into providing financially
unsustainable services, such as services to care homes, in order to maintain
customer loyalty and business turnover.
In the future, community pharmacists face a squeeze on both core dispensing
income and access to extended clinical services. But, the Leeds team
says, the existing community pharmacy network, public confidence in pharmacists,
and pharmacists’ commercial acumen have great potential “if
successfully harnessed to the cause of primary care” (2004;67:207). |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal