England's chief pharmaceutical officer (CPhO) David Webb is 'optimistic' about community pharmacy given the new government's priorities for healthcare, he told the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) conference on Friday.

''I was quite pleased when the government started talking about the three strategic shifts... sickness to prevention, analogue to digital, acute to community and primary - those things felt very pharmacy to me,' he said as part of a panel session with other national CPhOs.

He suggested that pharmacist prescribing could be utilised in a future version of Pharmacy First, while the service could also expand into 'collaborative long-term disease management'.

'Once you get into long-term condition management, that is not a uni-professional adventure anymore. And so that new spirit of collaboration, I think, is really important, particularly in primary care,' Mr Webb told RPS delegates.

'The opportunity has never been greater, but to get to that opportunity, we need coherence of argument. We need clarity of purpose. We need integrity, and we need vision. And all of those things that come through, I think, come through professional leadership,' Mr Webb added.

He also said professional leadership would be 'profoundly important' in the face of challenges such as 'increasing levels of patient expectation', 'highly complex therapies', artificial intelligence and the 'paradigm shift' of prescribing.

'I think as professionals, we are all going to need the support of an authoritative leadership body to move us forward,' he said.

Mr Webb also urged pharmacists to highlight what community pharmacy could do in the NHS England (NHSE) consultation on its 10-year plan, such as taking on a greater role in vaccinations to help tackle health inequalities.

He drew attention to community pharmacies participating in RSV vaccination pilots, and said: 'That, I think, is tremendous.'

'You can see how life course can be enabled through community pharmacy, from from birth all the way through the different phases of of our lives. And so I'm really sort of optimistic,' Mr Webb said.

However, he echoed Northern Ireland CPhO Cathy Harrison's concerns that adequate resourcing for such services was 'very important'.

Ms Harrison had previously said that in Northern Ireland, shifting care towards the community had not been done well 'at scale', despite 'very good practice in pharmacy and other areas'.

'I think that is because we still have not cracked working together, working with general practice and community pharmacy, working with social care, and also understanding our transitions in terms of in and out of secondary care,' she told RPS delegates.

For community pharmacy to invest in its workforce and infrastructure, 'we need money, and we need money to move within our system', Ms Harrison said.

'I think there is a recognition of that, and I am hearing people saying that in senior positions, but I have yet to see it manifesting,' she added.

'For us to really contribute in an integrated health and social care system, we really need a big investment in our digital infrastructure. We need to digitise our community pharmacy services, link them up so we can really benefit from the new prescribing workforce sector. And we look jealously at England in terms of electronic transmission of prescriptions, which we don't have [in Northern Ireland],' Ms Harrison said.