High street pharmacists in England will, for the first time, be able to prescribe medication, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced today. Minor conditions that require simple treatments may no longer involve prolonged waits at the GP – and patients requiring routine checks, like blood pressure measurements, will also be able to access these at their local pharmacies.
This simple shift will help ease the pressure on local health services: it is predicted to free up 15 million appointments and ensure that GPs have more time to deal with complex patients. It will also have a knock-on effect on hospital waiting times and, hopefully, the numbers on waiting lists – which have hit highs of seven million. If more patients can be dealt with in a pharmacy, fewer patients will be forced to attend emergency departments.
Pharmacists are highly-skilled professionals, and the move to ensure those working in the community can prescribe independently is much needed, as I wrote in December last year. The PM appeared to agree: in an interview with Katy Balls, Sunak said: ‘I read it. I may well have emailed my team! But that broader point is that we’ve got to think differently.’
There are concerns that not all pharmacies in England will be able to provide these new services
And Sunak appears to mean what he says: the government is investing £1.2 billion in the transformation of both GP and pharmacy services in England in a bid to cut NHS waiting lists, as he wrote today in the Sun. Not only will pharmacists in England get more prescribing powers – similar to those of Scottish pharmacists working under the ‘Pharmacy First’ programme – but Sunak’s plan looks to give patients more autonomy to self-refer. Instead of first having to see a GP in order to get a physiotherapist appointment, patients will be able to directly request an appointment with a physiotherapist themselves. The same goes for other services, like podiatry and audiometry.
Sunak’s plans – which will be supported by £645 million over two years – also include the modernisation of booking systems (from analogue phone systems to online booking forms) to end the ‘8am scramble’ for appointments. The declaration of more investment, paired with a push to train more professionals, is timely, given concerning figures that suggest England has lost 160 pharmacies over the last two years.
The Conservatives’ focus seems to be on how healthcare can work better on a local level: while pharmacists receive more powers, the government is set to increase funding for GPs to £11.5 billion. It’s not a new idea but it is the logical approach to drawing those people with less serious conditions out of A&E waiting rooms.
While Sunak’s plan sounds promising, care must be taken over its execution. Pharmacies need to have the resources available to them to ensure they can prepare for a new way of operating and to cope with the inevitable rise in patient demand. And there are concerns that not all pharmacies in England will be able to provide these new services, potentially causing longer waits for patients if this was to be the case. Public health education is vital too: patients need to better understand the value of the multidisciplinary healthcare team, to be prepared to stop calling their GP and instead go straight to the chemist for minor ailments.
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