By P3pharmacy editor Arthur Walsh

As I write this column, Lord Ara Darzi is sifting through stacks of evidence from a range of NHS stakeholders as part of his independent review into the state of the health service – and no doubt weighing up desperate funding pleas from just about everyone who got their submission in by the deadline. 

As you would expect, Community Pharmacy England made its own case for an “urgent uplift” in order to stabilise a struggling sector, as well as pitching for new commissioned services – emergency contraception supply and retooling Pharmacy First to include an offer of OTC medicines for hard-up patients, to name just two – if Labour is prepared to put its money where its mouth is as far as its proposed ‘neighbourhood health service’ 
is concerned. 

For me, perhaps the most interesting line in CPE’s submission was this argument: “Commissioning of GP and community pharmacy services could be better aligned to focus on integration, collaboration and shared goals rather than competing for resources.” 

It’s a salutary thought, and certainly chimes with changes we have seen in the past few years. The turf wars over flu jab patients, once an annual tradition, haven’t been hitting the headlines the way they used to. And in some parts of the country at least, referral-based services have led to stronger links between general practice and pharmacy, albeit much work remains to be done on this front.

But the decision by many GP practices – 65 per cent, if the findings of a Pulse Magazine survey are an accurate indicator – to switch off the GP Connect function allowing pharmacies to share consultation data as part of practices’ industrial action looks to me to be a worrying step in the wrong direction.

The BMA’s General Practice Committee argued that allowing others to share diagnoses and observations regarding patient care with surgeries could create unintended consequences, with GPC digital lead Dr David Wrigley commenting that asking doctors to “follow up” on these patients would “add further pressure”.

Meanwhile, pharmacies were just left scratching their heads. Not only were they potentially looking at increased patient demand due to the industrial action, now they would have to go back to entering the same data manually. 

Data sharing across different providers is surely one of the most worthwhile developments we’ve had in recent years, and given the excruciating delays there have been in getting to where we are now it seems a shame for any party to hold up progress.

Others have shared interesting ideas for how the concept of data interoperability can be developed further. In Greater Manchester they have launched a regional care record, while the Tony Blair Institute recently published its vision for a digital record that could, the Company Chemists’ Association argues, give pharmacies a more central role in preventative care. Let’s hope any future progress is not met with the same kind of baseless suspicion.