Making Changes Meeting Needs – a prospectus for the development of community pharmacy services within the NHS

The NPA has published a medium-term prospectus for the development of pharmacy services in England. It follows months of dialogue with NPA members about what a clinical future could look like for the sector.

‘Making Changes Meeting Needs’ will be shared with the King’s Fund and Nuffield Trust who are currently working on a new vision for the future on behalf of Community Pharmacy England.

Amongst the ambitions in the NPA’s prospectus are:

• Improve the management of long-term conditions such as asthma, hypertension, heart failure and diabetes
• Expand preventative interventions to help make the NHS a wellness, health-inequality reversing service
• Shift focus from a downstream dispensing role to an end-to-end prescription management role, with a focus on good pharmaceutical outcomes
• Become the go-to professionals for optimising the use of medicines, including upgraded Structured Medication Reviews and post-discharge reconciliation
• Offer prompt and accurate diagnosis, risk stratification based upon genotype and the capacity for personalised treatments
• Increase medicines safety right across the care pathway
• Build on hospital touchpoints – preparing people going into hospital for elective care, give them a soft landing back into the community and reduce readmissions
• Dramatically improve access to primary care

We invite you to take a careful look at this report and to give us your feedback at independentsvoice@npa.co.uk