Community pharmacies that are ready to embrace technology and innovation will have a major part to play in the government's plan to transform the NHS, according to panellists speaking on the Pharmacy Business Webinar: Digital Health and Technology.
The government announced last week in its NHS 10 Year Plan that ‘there is now strong evidence that a bigger role for pharmacy can deliver efficiencies and support financial sustainability'.
Community pharmacies will soon support people in managing complex medication regimens, as well as provide treatment for obesity, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.
They will also play a bigger role in prevention through screening services and vaccine delivery, including providing a catch-up service for the HPV vaccination.
Baba Akomolafe pharmacist and director at Christchurch Pharmacy, said whilst community pharmacies are a ‘big player’ in primary care, they will have to show the government they are capable of taking on more clinical services and relieve pressure on GPs.
“GPs are the major stakeholders in primary care but they are overwhelmed - my wife's a GP so I know they are under too much pressure already,” said Akomolafe.
“We are at a place right now where GPs desperately need pharmacies to step up and help out, because everything that's coming to community they can't cope with.
“We (community pharmacies) need to look at ourselves and see how we can increase our capacity and with the help of technology, be able to handle more clinical services.
“At the moment, there are seven services as part of Pharmacy First but there's a lot more that needs to come to pharmacies - we need to be able to take off a lot of weight from the GPs.”
Baba with his wife Dupe
Last month, the government said it will invest up to £10 billion in the NHS tech ‘to bring our analogue health system into the digital age’, as part of the latest spending review.
The NHS 10 Year Plan places huge faith in technology in the shape of digital, data, AI, robotics and genomics, to transform the delivery of health and care.
The government wants to free up hospitals to ‘prioritise safe deployment of AI and harness new technology to bring the very best of cutting-edge care to all patients’.
Its target is to have all hospitals fully AI-enabled within the lifetime of this plan.
Yasmin Karsan, a pharmacist, digital clinical safety officer and AI Engineer at Peachy healthcare, told delegates that there is already so much technology available for community pharmacies to utilise.
“In the long term plan, there was a lot of AI mentioned but before we even enter the realm of AI, there is so much more that we can do technologically in community pharmacy to empower and triage our patients prior to them coming to see us within the pharmacy,” she said.
“There is huge capacity for us to do more than we've ever done to support our communities and bring healthcare home, bring it deep rooted back to where we're embedded.”
Yasmin Karsan
At the centre of the 10 Year Plan will be new health centres as part of a Neighbourhood Health Service bringing a broader range of services under one roof. The government said that would free hospitals from 'perpetual firefighting' and bring down waiting lists.
Over the next five years, community pharmacy will transition from being focused largely on dispensing medicines to becoming integral to the Neighbourhood Health Service, offering more clinical services, according to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).
The DHSC added that it is committed to engaging with the sector on modernising the approach to dispensing medicines and making better use of technology, including dispensing robots and hub-and-spoke models.
Cyrus Hodivala, managing director at Meditech UK & Ireland and owner of Cristal Pharmacy, believes it is crucial community pharmacists invest in technology to free up their time to run more clinical services.
Cyrus Hodivala
“I've met thousands of pharmacists around the world and I'm yet to meet a pharmacist that went through five years at university and years of experience in their pharmacy to count boxes in a back room - they want to engage with patients,” said Hodivala.
“They want to operate at the top of their mandate, and to do that, they need to have time. Streamlining their software processes, streamlining the way they manage prescriptions, their ordering, pack dispensing, robotics, using AI for clinical checking - all of those elements together creates that time we’re so desperate to have to be in front of the patients.”
The next episode in this series of webinars looks at Skills Mix in Pharmacy.
To register, please visit: https://www.pharmacy.biz/webinar-series-2025
