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A former chair of the British Medical Association (BMA) has described the lack of joined-up working between pharmacy and general practice as “nonsensical”.
Speaking at the Multidisciplinary and Multiprofessional Healthcare Forum — a House of Commons event held on 28 October 2024 — Chaand Nagpaul, a London GP who was formerly chair of the BMA’s GPs committee, as well as its council chair, said: “I think it’s nonsensical that I, as a GP, am in my practice trying to manage [a patient’s] high blood pressure and the same patient can go into a pharmacy and, in a disjointed way, see a pharmacist for that same problem.”
Under the blood pressure check service, which launched on 1 October 2021, community pharmacies can offer checks to people aged over 40 years without a diagnosis of hypertension and those aged under 40 years who request a check owing to a family history of hypertension.
In November 2023, NHS England announced that all pharmacies offering the Pharmacy First service would also need to offer the blood pressure check service by 31 March 2025.
Nagpaul was responding to a question on whether aligning the community pharmacy and GP contracts would help to address structural problems in the NHS.
He told MPs, and other members of the audience, that systems to enable joint working in the NHS are “woefully deficient”. He added that, to fix them, “we need to have interoperability… we need to get that right, and some of the contracts should be joint in my view for certain pathways of care”.
Describing the question as highlighting “how broken we are in terms of siloed working”, Nagpaul said: “We have something called Pharmacy First, where a patient can go into a pharmacy for seven conditions, but [what the pharmacist enters] does not go back to the GP automatically. We have to employ a member of staff to transcribe that information into our system.”
Earlier in October 2024, NHS England said that the development of access to GP patient records from community pharmacies was still in the pilot phase, despite initial plans for it to be available by the end of January 2024.
Speaking at The Pharmacy Show in Birmingham on 13 October 2024, Ursa Alad, head of delivery, community pharmacy commissioning and digital strategy at NHS England, said the NHS was working with four community pharmacy suppliers to deliver the GP Connect service, with one supplier live in “a few pharmacies”, but added that full access was “not quite there yet”.
GP Connect will enable authorised clinical staff to share and view GP practice clinical information and data between IT systems. It was expected to be ready for the launch of the Pharmacy First scheme in England.
Also speaking at the parliamentary forum on the need for a better flow of patient data in the NHS, Janet Morrison, chief executive of Community Pharmacy England, said: “We negotiated the contract for Pharmacy First and I would like to assure you that it is planned to be fully interoperable with GP systems, so that we can access and update patient records and also refer onwards.
“That was always part of the plan, but unfortunately it wasn’t all put in place before the service was fully commissioned, but that is planned and hopefully we will all work to make that work.”
