Community pharmacies could be key to keeping local communicates healthy, but aren’t always being used to the full, according to a pharmacy practice expert at the University.
Professor Janet Krska says making better use of community pharmacies would help improve access to NHS Health Checks and many other services which could help people to live healthier lives.
Professor Krska, of the University’s pharmacy school, led a recent study that produced the first detailed statistics on service commissioning from community pharmacies by local authorities.
The resulting map of public health services commissioned highlights the disparity between service commissioning and apparent local need and is expected to help inform discussions between commissioners and community pharmacies on service provision.
Professor Krska, Professor of Pharmacy Practice at Medway School of Pharmacy, which is jointly run by Kent and the University of Greenwich, said it was surprising that these data sets were not ‘routinely available’.
She said that the study findings ‘demonstrate the significant extent to which community pharmacies already contribute to public health improvement’, but also ‘illustrate how much better the many services they can offer could be distributed’.
The study, entitled A cross-sectional study using freedom of information requests to evaluate variation in local authority commissioning of community pharmacy public health services in England was co-authored by Professor Krska with Dr Adam Mackridge of Liverpool John Moores University and Dr Nicola Gray of Green Line Consulting.
The research is published by BMJ Open. See also The Conversation.