Pharmacy can help deliver NHS five-year vision

The new government will need to deliver the NHS Five Year Forward View and pharmacy will have a big part in this.

The ‘Community pharmacy future’ project I am involved with is producing evidence of the benefits that pharmacists bring by supporting better medicines use by patients with long-term conditions.

Pharmacies will need to start providing more holistic, patient-centred packages of care, not just one-off or disease-specific services. Many patients have multiple, complex and ongoing conditions and we need to give them continuing care that brings better outcomes and reduces pressures on other parts of the NHS.

To be an integral part of delivering the NHS Five Year Forward View, we need to produce more evidence of why involving community pharmacies improves patients’ experiences, clinical effectiveness, patient safety and brings overall health economic benefits to the NHS (i.e. providing reasons to invest in pharmacy).

I want our ambitions for pharmacy to be underpinned by a robust evidence base so that we are an integral part of the primary care team. This will be my focus if I were elected to the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s English Pharmacy Board.

 

Tracey Thornley

Election candidate

English Pharmacy Board

Royal Pharmaceutical Society

Last updated
Citation
The Pharmaceutical Journal, PJ, 2 May 2015, Vol 294, No 7860;294(7860):DOI:10.1211/PJ.2015.20068438

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