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Some GPs are attempting a pharmacy land grab and the government says there are no plans to provide Pharmacy First via the NHS app. So much for a collaborative 10-year NHS plan, writes Neil Trainis...

The government’s 10-year vision for the NHS was supposed to be underpinned by the principle that health professions put aside historical differences and work together for the benefit of patients. 

And yet as neighbourhood health centres take shape across England, the dream of a collaborative community-based healthcare system is starting to feel like a dystopian screenplay where rivalry and suspicion prevail.

Take the Local Medical Committee (LMC) conference in Manchester this month. Items on the agenda included reallocating Pharmacy First funding to general practice and scrapping the ‘one-mile rule’ which would allow dispensing doctors to dispense medicines to patients who live less than a mile from the nearest pharmacy.

There was also an emergency motion from Avon LMC calling for a ballot on "non-compliance with GP Connect". That, we were told, was down to GPs’ “growing concerns over data protection, inappropriate third-party access and erosion of patient confidentiality”. No matter that the service allows pharmacists to update GP records so patients receive seamless care. No matter that it became a compulsory part of the GP contract last month.

It gets worse. A reallocation of Pharmacy First funding to GPs and abolition of the ‘one-mile rule’ feels like a desperate land grab, just as the battle of the flu posters did. Let’s take the first of those. We know GPs are swamped. They’ve said so themselves.

“We need to alleviate the pressure we’re under!” they’ve cried. There’s a twisted logic to taking funding away from a service which, aside from giving patients timely and easy access to treatment for seven conditions, takes the strain off GPs.

If anything, greater funding should be ploughed into Pharmacy First, so more conditions are added and pharmacy teams are better supported to roll it out.

Speaking of the government, they have said there are no plans to provide Pharmacy First appointments via the NHS app. That’s the NHS app which is at the heart of the 10-year plan’s digital revolution. In Labour’s own words, it will liberate NHS staff “from a burden of bureaucracy and administration”.

“Pharmacy First was not designed to replicate the GP appointment system,” the health minister Stephen Kinnock said in a letter justifying the absence of Pharmacy First from the app.

Where the hell is the logic in that?

Neil Trainis is the editor of Independent Community Pharmacist.