General Practitioners

(asked on 13th March 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if he will make it his policy to require clinical commissioning groups to transfer areas of work from GPs to pharmacists where there is evidence that such a transfer would be more efficient.


Answered by
 Portrait
David Mowat
This question was answered on 21st March 2017

With regard to utilising the important role that community pharmacists fulfil, measures announced on 20 October 2016 mean that from 1 December 2016, we have helped to relieve pressure on other parts of the National Health Service, by embedding pharmacy into the urgent care pathway, including for those who need urgent repeat prescriptions and treatment for urgent minor ailments and common conditions. Patients who need urgent repeat prescription medicines will be referred from NHS 111 directly to community pharmacies, rather than via a general practitioner out-of-hours service, and NHS England will encourage clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) to commit to national coverage of minor ailments services delivered through pharmacies commissioned locally by April 2018. This will build on the some half of CCGs which already commission this service from community pharmacies.

The new Pharmacy Integration Fund has been established to support additional programmes to better embed pharmacists’ clinical skills within NHS services, including more effective integration with general practice.

We are committed to employing up to 2,000 pharmacists in general practices across the country. To date, the pilot programme has successfully integrated 491 clinical pharmacists into 658 general practices across England and funding is now available for the deployment of the further 1,500 clinical pharmacists in general practices by 2020.

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