OPTIMISING THE POTENTIAL OF COMMUNITY PHARMACY
Our local pharmacy teams have demonstrated time and again that community pharmacy is the front door to the health service and the safety net of primary care.
By Gerard Greene, Chief Executive, Community Pharmacy NI
L
ocal pharmacies have been steadfast in their commitment in supporting the health and well-being of their local communities,
particularly when faced with the challenges of the last number of years and I thank you all wholeheartedly for this. As medicine experts in the heart of the community, our pharmacists are some of the most accessible healthcare professionals with at least 123,000 people in the cities, towns, and villages across Northern Ireland using community pharmacies every day to access services with no appointment needed.
The three-year Commissioning Plan announced by Mr Robin Swann MLA in his position as Health Minister would be an opportunity to further enhance the role of community pharmacy teams and acts as a roadmap of how services would be developed, delivered, and funded during 2022-2025.
Building on existing community pharmacy services and developing new services that benefit and support patients, the plan is instrumental in improving opportunities for community pharmacists to use their clinical skills. It is now hugely disappointing and frustrating, that despite the positive impact that these services would make to patients and pharmacy teams, we are at the point at which its implementation and associated funding has stalled due to factors outside our control.
The knock-on effect being, we are still waiting for the clinical services outlined in the plan to be fully rolled out, leaving many community pharmacists feeling that their professional progression is at a standstill. This means we are seeing highly qualified healthcare professionals graduate, but they are then often drawn to work in other pharmacy settings which present more opportunities to use their clinical skills or leave Northern Ireland to work in community pharmacy elsewhere.
CPNI will however continue to prioritise service development and the utilisation of community pharmacist skills, including independent prescribers, going forward to support patients.
This year, Community Pharmacy NI commissioned KPMG to build on a previous report from 2021 which investigated the strengths of community pharmacy services,
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