By Chris Martin

Last month I attended the Welsh Pharmacy Awards 2019. What a celebration of everything that is great about pharmacy in the principality. I was fortunate enough to be asked to judge the innovation and technology category again this year. Things might be tough for our profession right now, but we were offered new apps, unique nursing home pouch dispensing, and robotic solutions improving quality and patient care. Inspirational!

Earlier that day I was able to join colleagues at the Welsh Pharmacy Conference and catch up with Andrew Evans, the chief pharmaceutical officer for Wales. During his keynote address he suggested Wales is the best place to own a community pharmacy – there is more spent on medicines per head of population in Wales than in any of the other home nations, while the money that was cut in England was ringfenced and invested in service development in Wales. 

However, it is clear that colleagues are facing tough times. So is there light at the end of the tunnel? 

I also caught up with Mair Davies, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s outgoing director for Wales. She shared Pharmacy: Delivering a Healthier Wales with me, a vision for the future of pharmacy in Wales commissioned by the Welsh Pharmaceutical Committee.

Its key recommendations are:

• Pharmacy services will be designed around patient needs
• Care will be delivered in local communities with pharmacy teams integrated with other services to improve the health and wellbeing of the population
• Together, pharmacy teams will improve patient knowledge through co-production
• Pharmacists will focus on optimising therapeutic outcomes using tools that include prescribing
• Pharmacy technicians will focus on management and use of medicines
• Pharmacy services will support and drive innovation and equitable access to new medicines and related technologies, providing seamless care for the people of Wales.

What do you reckon? 

There are 14 principles to transform pharmacy in Wales, split across four themes: enhancing the patient experience; developing the workforce; seamless pharmaceutical care; and harnessing innovation and technology. It has some short term goals (by 2022) and longer term ones (by 2030).

Short term goals include:

• Community pharmacy teams will be the first point of contact for common ailments
• To have 30 per cent of community pharmacies with an independent prescriber actively providing services
• A consultant pharmacist in all sectors, including community
• A foundation programme embedded for all pharmacy professionals
• Structures will be embedded that foster leadership
• Pharmacy services will be formally integrated into cluster networks
• Access to medicines will be transformed across secondary care to improve quality, sustainability and value
• A new community pharmacy contract with an increased focus on medicines optimisation, health and wellbeing
• A central electronic patient health record
• Consultations facilitated by telehealth
• E-medicines management systems will be integrated across all sectors.

The longer term goals include patients not experiencing avoidable harm from medicines, an independent prescriber in every community pharmacy, seamless transition of care across traditional sectors facilitated by closer working between pharmacy teams, a workforce with the skills necessary to lead innovation in therapies, multi-sectoral training sites with multidisciplinary input, pharmacy managing all medicines, and central electronic medical records accessed and updated by all practitioners, including the pharmacy team.

I’m really impressed with the ambition. When delivered it will ensure that community pharmacy takes its rightful seat at the table of primary healthcare. As a first step, the Welsh Pharmaceutical Committee is calling on the Welsh Government to create and fund a Delivery Programme Board to facilitate and coordinate implementation, using the 2022 goals as the starting point.

The elephant in the room will be the funding model, but we are lucky in having a supportive chief pharmaceutical officer and health minister, so there has never been a better time to produce a vision for the profession in Wales. 

Reasons to be optimistic? Surely the future is bright in Wales.