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Pharmacy teams can be motivated to deliver NHS services by pitching it as a way to fund extra staff members and ultimately relieve workload pressures, Community Pharmacy North East London chief executive Shilpa Shah has said.

Addressing the Sigma Pharmaceuticals conference in Baku on Monday May 12, Ms Shah told pharmacy owners: "If you're a pharmacy and you just do five New Medicine Service consultations a week, five Pharmacy First, three contraception consultations and five blood pressure checks - which may lead to an ABPM - you can make £451.70 a week.

"If you have a colleague that is on minimum wage and over the age of 21 earning £12.21 and working 37 and a half hours, that is £457.88.

"So you basically need to pay £6-7 for a full-time member of staff - and that doesn't include some of your locally commissioned services, it doesn't include the Discharge Medicine Service or smoking cessation, as they rely on referral procedures."

Ms Shah encouraged the audience of pharmacy contractors to speak to their teams about the potential of these services and "show them the size of the prize - maybe even promising them that if we can deliver this consistently week on week, I will get an extra member of staff for you so that life is a bit easier and less stressful... when you put it like that, it doesn't feel like too much".

The LPC chief also recommended taking advantage of apprenticeship funds, which as retail businesses pharmacies pay a levy into: "That's something I don't think we utilise in community pharmacy. 

"You can use apprenticeships to train up pharmacy technicians. How many of you are tapping into that funding? How many of you are applying?"

And she encouraged business owners to forge links with primary care networks and integrated care boards, saying: "If your PCN has a meeting and they invite you to the pharmacy to it, please do your best to try and go along... be part of that PCN show them and tell them about all the great work that you do."

Pharmacy should also engage with the Labour government's plans to develop neighbourhood-based health schemes, which she said will not be "just an extension of PCNs".

CPNEL has managed to secure PCN funding for pharmacist leads who attend local NHS meetings and advise commissioners on developments in pharmacy, she said: "They talk about Pharmacy First, they talk about hypertension, they talk about the contraception service and they keep everybody up to date on what's going on. 

"It is something you may need to invest in in your business if you don't have funding for that, because those relationships are gonna be absolutely key when we look at moving into neighborhoods."

Commenting on the looming abolition of NHS England, Ms Shah said it may present an opportunity for community pharmacies through removing "a layer of bureaucracy that perhaps we don't necessarily need" and could mean that "the Department of Health and Social Care is closer to the ground - that's ideally what we want".