The sigh of relief from across the profession at the result of the NMS evaluation must have been sufficient to at least blow a few stray prescriptions across dispensing benches around England.

Whatever your views on the new medicine service, and these are many and varied, it would have been hugely embarrassing, to say the least, if 90 per cent of community pharmacies were found to have been wasting NHS money for three years because they couldn’t deliver a fairly straightforward clinical service with any degree of effectiveness. If pharmacists had been unable even to improve adherence by, the not exactly earth-shattering, 10 per cent they managed, most of our representatives’ arguments for more medicines’ optimisation roles would be dead in the water.

Many of us could come up with suggestions for better ways to spend NMS funding within pharmacy. We could well pontificate at length on the benefits of our pet service. But NMS, unlike most other pharmacy services, is now proven to work at a national level and for a known cost and benefit. And the GPs don’t seem to mind pharmacists having a go at NMS, as it doesn’t encroach on their territory (or money) to any great extent. So, like it or not, it looks like we’re stuck with it.

On the plus side, the well-respected academic authors have squeezed a few valuable pro- pharmacy arguments on related matters into their report. Pharmacists could do with access to patient records: hurrah! NMS should be integrated into care pathways: brilliant! More support staff: bring it on! Try making those points well in an evaluation of the impact of National Smile Month among community pharmacies in Suffolk, for example.

And without NMS, we would lose a fantastically rich vein of pointless pharmacy debate. What better way to spend an evening with colleagues in the pub than discussing matters such as the impact of NMS consultations on workflow, which drugs should be included, are independents or multiples better at delivery, who has the best anecdote of a live-saving NMS intervention made in their pharmacy, and so on.

But, with non-compliance apparently as high as 50 per cent, how many pharmacists can honestly say they would be proud to admit that their best efforts improved adherence by just 10 per cent? Answers on the back of a postcard please

Steve Bremer, Editor