Pharmacists 'should help ease GP pressure'

[Northerner]

An "army" of pharmacists should step in to help treat patients at GP practices across England, according to plans by leading health professionals.

The proposals focus on pharmacists seeing patients with common ailments directly - not on setting up shops within surgeries.

Pharmacists would provide health advice and be able to prescribe medication once extra training had been completed.

Charities welcomed the move but say patient safety must be a priority.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-31904812

This all presupposes that pharmacists have long periods of spare time to allocate - the pharmacist at my local pharmacy seems to be non-stop as things are, so I'm not sure where all this time is coming from! 🙄

 

[Pumper_Sue]

I wonder if they speak English or understand it? Many of the local pharmacists here have come from overseas and their English leaves a lot to be desired. 🙄

 

[Copepod]

If it means that instead of highly trained pharmacy graduates being lost to the profession because of lack of posts, then that's good. If they leave the profession to some other application of chemistry, for example, they are unlikely to come back, particularly given the complications of getting and keeping professional qualifications, usually each year.

I don't think that there's any proposal that Northerner's over busy pharmacist in a chemist shop would have to do extra shifts at GP surgery.

GMC managed to get rules changed so that EU doctors' English language and local knowledge can be tested by potential employers, following death of a man in Cambridgeshire after he was injected with 10 times the correct dose of diamorphine by Dr Daniel Ubani, a German registed doctor working as a locum in 2008 - diamorphine is rarely used in Germany. So, pharmacy body should be able to insist on similar standards in pharmacists.

 

[grovesy]

I was recently called for an appointment for medication review at my Doctors by a Pharmacist.