The pharmacist can see you now

UK GPs will lose hundreds of millions of pounds from their prescribing budgets under Government plans to dramatically expand the services provided by pharmacists, PULSE has revealed.

Department of Health documents also reveal plans for pharmacists to take on large chunks of GPs’ work, claiming they will do it more cheaply and efficiently.

The impact assessments for April’s white paper on pharmacy predict up to 50% of GP minor ailment work will move to pharmacists, cutting prescribing costs by up to £300m ‘through resource reallocation at GP practices’.

‘We have assumed the increase in pharmacists’ costs will be matched by a comparative decrease in GPs’ prescription costs. PCTs are assumed to relocate prescribing budgets from GPs to pharmacies,’ the assessment of minor ailment services reads.

Another document warns GPs are too expensive to be employed for monitoring patients with chronic conditions, warning: ‘Unit costs for GPs of providing these additional services would be significantly higher than for pharmacies.’

Under proposals in the pharmacy white paper, pharmacists would run chronic disease clinics, cardiovascular screening and public health programmes.

But GP prescribing experts warned the proposals thrust pharmacists directly into competition with GPs for resources, and risked seriously fragmenting patient care. Dr Bill Beeby, chair of the GPC clinical and prescribing subcommittee, said: ‘If you are asking pharmacists to suddenly take on long-term care, I am just not sure how that is safe. We start to fragment and compete for doing little jobs.

‘GPs are at risk, because we are not accustomed to breaking down things in terms of cost. So when it comes to bidding for services we tend not to be good at that.’

The assessment of services for long-term conditions predicts the cost of running pharmacist-led clinics would run to between £2.3bn and £3.6bn, but would be offset by increased medication adherence and reduced GP visits.