The head of pharmacy practice at the UK’s second largest chain on the dire need for prescribing supervisors and why a company should maintain open lines of communication

I did my pre-reg with Boots and moved up to a pharmacy manager role, but eventually I became disillusioned with the lack of career progression opportunities. After locuming for a while, I joined what was then the Co-operative Pharmacy in 2005 and went from multi-site management to central operations before joining the superintendent’s team about 15 years ago. Three years ago, I took on the superintendent pharmacist role. No two days are the same.

We are now the UK’s second biggest chain, with Lloyds disappearing. Our proposition is a lot bigger – we are now the largest contractor in Wales and we’re getting opportunities that we probably didn’t get before. However, our basic business strategy remains the same. It’s all about serving local patients in the communities we operate in. We’re nimble enough to be agile; some organisations are seen as a Titanic, but here you can get to the senior leaders and owners really quickly if important decisions need to be made.

We have stores signed up to the Prescribing Pathfinder Programme, but the scheme is not going in the way I’d anticipated and I would have expected NHS England to be a lot further on by now. Really, we need to get some momentum if we don’t want England to be left behind, whatever the reasons for the delays – factors like Pharmacy First and slow progress with the clinical platform have been suggested.

In terms of independent prescribing more generally, the big issue everyone has is with the designated prescribing practitioners (DPPs). We are sleepwalking into a major problem for the sector. What the NHS needs to do is provide a list and say how many there are. We’ve reduced the number of foundation year placements we’re offering. We’ve been realistic because we want to provide DPP places to all our foundation pharmacists. Hopefully, if further DPPs become available or if there’s a change in the programme, we will get the opportunity to review that. People have been told not to withdraw training places because something is happening nationally. But whatever that is, there needs to be more transparency.

There is a lot happening with pharmacy technicians’ practice, too. One is the Patient Group Directions (PGD) legislation coming through. Once the contract service specifications have been amended, technicians will be able to play a bigger part. They are already familiar with vaccination services after the pandemic, and they can play a really big part in that. The other element is supervision. I was fortunate enough to be a Company Chemists Association representative on the cross-sector working group that made recommendations to the Government. This will create great opportunities for our pharmacy technicians to support the dispensing workload and help our pharmacists see patients.

Some people are sceptical about giving pharmacy technicians a bigger role, but it’s not something I’ve encountered at Well. If we don’t think forward, we will be left behind as a sector – but we do need to have the right support and governance frameworks in place and do everything with patient safety in mind.

We’re starting to see people apply for roles with us who had left community to work in primary care networks and got disillusioned – both pharmacists and technicians.

The training for Pharmacy First landed at the worst possible time, but our pharmacists have really got behind it and it’s been really positive for patients. If the funding flows, then it’s a good revenue stream for us – but if the £645 million doesn’t fully flow into pharmacy then it will be a disaster.

Wes Streeting and his team need to lower the Pharmacy First activity thresholds to make them more realistic and achievable, and they need to grow the service – seven conditions is not enough. It needs to move to where the devolved nations are.

We’ve set our teams an ambition to try to detect one patient in need of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring per week – that way, we can save someone’s life.

It’s disappointing that every time pharmacy has been mentioned by politicians, they refer to the £645m attached to Pharmacy First. That funding is greatly received, it’s new money for new services, but the core funding is where the issue lies.

Our owner, the Bestway Group, is committed and wants pharmacy to succeed – it has pumped millions into Well for things like our state-of-the-art central fill hub in Stoke. But for pharmacy to succeed, everyone has to get access to more funding. I would encourage Wes Streeting to look at the recommendations in the Parliamentary Health Select Committee from May – it gives a blueprint for overhauling the contractual framework.