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Pharmacist prescribing in England is likely to be driven by a mixture of centrally commissioned national initiatives and more grassroots-level work, a panel of senior industry figures told the Company Chemists’ Association in London on Tuesday June 30. 

Asked by P3pharmacy whether a national service or a local commissioning model would be more beneficial, the panel – former chief pharmacist Bruce Warner, Boots superintendent Claire Nevinson and Cencora Alliance Healthcare’s Raj Nutan – agreed the most likely scenario is “a bit of both,” as Mr Warner put it.

Mr Nutan shared his view: “If you look at the clinical safeguards that are required, I do think that needs to be at a national level in terms of quality and safety.”

He also suggested that funding and remuneration should be agreed at a national level, as happens in Scotland and Wales.

Ms Nevinson agreed that a nationally commissioned service would be a logical next step but added that there is room for locally led work “responding to the specific needs of those communities”.

Mr Warner said the debate around local versus national commissioning has “been there for as long as I can remember”.

He commented: “Local is particularly problematic for patients that live on the borders of areas, where they’re getting different services from different places – that can be confusing.

“What can be done at a national level is certainly set the expectations, and I think that we could be better at doing that.”

He said that in his experience pharmacists “want a bit of both – they want that hybrid, and I suspect that's probably where we'll end up”.

The former chief pharmaceutical officer for England also questioned whether the MPharm degree “should be reclassified as a vocational degree as opposed to a scientific degree”.

“I wouldn't want to lose any of the science, but the advantage of doing that is that it gives you an extra four months in the academic year to put that experiential learning in place,” said Mr Warner.