Please note: these are not the thoughts of Medway School of Pharmacy.
I just recently read an article which states Jeremy Hunt is now considering a pay rise for doctors. This is in response to the riots by junior doctors and others concerned about what they describe as the crumbling of the NHS. Mr Hunt and the current government are thinking of passing a new contract that will keep the NHS running for twenty-four hours, seven days a week. It’s mostly aimed at changing doctors’ working hours but what struck me the most is the absence of dialogue between the government and other people who work diligently to keep the NHS running. I am talking about pharmacists.
I often wonder if the lack of media coverage in major news outlets is because the public don’t have an understanding of pharmacists’ roles in the NHS or there is ignorance about how the proposed contract will affect other professions. Pharmacists, for years, have had an active role in keeping patients safe and also supporting doctors. They work within the NHS to manage and optimise medicines for patients. Depending on what additional responsibilities they have taken, pharmacists deal with the procurement and budgeting of drugs. This means they save the NHS money in addition to saving patient’s lives on a daily basis. They perform such tasks alongside doctors. So if doctors stay longer at work, so will pharmacists. If doctors fail to perform because of fatigue it will be difficult for pharmacists to do their job.
In primary care, pharmacists are delivering services that used to be delivered in the GP surgeries such as providing annual flu vaccines and dealing with minor patient illnesses. They have eased NHS pressures on GPs by moving into the surgeries. Consequently, pharmacists see patients more frequently now than in previous decades. Which is why when I was researching about how the seven hour service contract is going to affect pharmacists I was a little confused as to why they were only a few articles on the subject.
Cameron has reportedly said “Let me be clear, this doesn’t mean that all staff in the NHS have to work every seven days, it just means the services are available.” But is that necessarily true? Who is then going to be providing these services and keeping them open? A seven day GP surgery will not only increase pressure on GP surgeries but will also mean patients will expect pharmacies to open for longer too. The majority of community pharmacies already open 6 days a week but for them to open a 7 day service will undoubtedly affect the quality of services being delivered and lead to poor staff morale. Some might say that a lot of community pharmacies have been providing seven day services for a while now. I would argue that these pharmacies don’t have the excess patients a 7 day service contract will bring. The increased use of services will add to the stress that pharmacists are already battling as revealed by C+D in a survey conducted in 2013.
As you can see such statements by our prime minister leave a lot of questions unanswered. The ones I would like to be answered are as follows; how is this 7 day contract going to affect pharmacists? Are pharmacists going to now have a greater role and if so how are they going to get compensated and supported to achieve this? I would encourage pharmacists as a profession to ask these questions because any change to the NHS will affect them. The more pharmacists ask questions the more their worries will be raised by the media.
Conclusively, the NHS is more than just doctors. It is made up of different professions that work together to provide the best care for patients. So when we discuss issues that concern such a system we need to think of how a change, such as a 7 day service, can have knock on effects on the whole. All professions need to be given a voice. Pharmacists need to be given a voice and they need to use it.
What are your thoughts on the seven day service proposals?