All pharmacies should have a second pharmacist if the profession is to take advantage of the opportunities offered in the NHS Five Year Forward View, NHS England’s deputy chief pharmaceutical officer has said.Speaking at the Pharmacy Management National Forum on November 18, Dr Bruce Warner said: “We need to create a system where the second pharmacist is the norm, and pharmacists can learn their trade in a supportive and nurturing environment and develop a career progression.” This was just one element of a “huge piece of work” the profession had to do if it were to take advantage of opportunities to develop new models of care.

The Five Year Forward View represented “a paradigm shift towards prevention rather than treatment”. Rather than a “one size fits all” solution, a menu of care models for local areas was needed to address the care and quality gap. New models of care could deliver significant efficiency gains as well as providing a “radical upgrade in prevention strategy”.

Pharmacy was well placed to take advantage of new technology and situations but pharmacists had to think about delivering care in different ways. And the profession faced a number of challenges, including:

• Creating the headroom for pharmacy to fulfill its patient- focused potential
• Ensuring the workforce had the patient-centred skills to deliver what it promised
• Ensuring that pharmacy was perceived as a clinical profession rather than simply a supply function.

“We mustn’t be afraid of letting go of doing things the old way. I would love to see pharmacists interacting with patients, doing a clinical check right at the front of the process – that’s where the value lies. We have to push for read-and-write access to patient records and we should also keep clinical notes. We’re the only healthcare profession that doesn’t do that.”