As I listened to Community Pharmacy Scotland chief executive Harry McQuillan give the University College London School of Pharmacy lecture last night, an interesting but fanciful thought occurred to me. If he had been working at NHS England for the last few years, community pharmacy there might be in a much better place than it is now.

I’m not knocking England’s chief pharmaceutical officer David Webb who prominent individuals in community pharmacy have told me in recent months that he’s doing his very best within the parameters of his job.

But I don’t think NHSE has ever fully understood community pharmacy and sometimes failed to appreciate the impact of its policies on pharmacies and patients. I'll give you some examples. In February, Community Pharmacy England chief executive Janet Morrison criticised NHSE for its “irresponsible” campaign to get people to go to pharmacies for non-urgent health advice for minor conditions, accusing it failing to consider the pressures pharmacy teams are under.

In 2020, the pharmacy sector criticised its plans to get pharmacists to review the medicines of millions of patients because of the “unrealistic” workload that would generate. And in 2018, McQuillan himself voiced concerns about NHSE’s plan to reduce the prescribing of over-the-counter medicines for 33 minor conditions, saying it failed to protect people on low incomes and those with poor health literacy.

As he spoke succinctly and incisively about pharmacy practice, which he believes should be firmly embedded in local communities (NHSE’s desire has been to get pharmacists into practices), I thought ‘NHSE needs a Harry McQuillan.’

He was common sense personified, tweaking the phraseology and in doing so, simplifying the concepts. It should be about “safety of supply” not “accuracy of supply,” he said. “Independent pharmacist prescriber? We don’t need ‘independent.’ It’s pharmacist prescriber.”

And hub and spoke? “It’s spoke and hub…the magic happens in the spoke, not the hub,” he said. And when a pharmacist in the audience moaned that pharmacies need two pharmacists, McQuillan replied he once visited a pharmacy with four pharmacists then challenged the pharmacist to think about the team and whether a pharmacy really needs more than one pharmacist.

As I continued listening, I started to get a sense of why community pharmacy is making faster progress in Scotland than in England. None of what McQuillan said was rocket science. It was simply clarity of thought.

Neil Trainis is the editor of Independent Community Pharmacist.