A Labour MP and community pharmacist has suggested that the community pharmacist prescribing service could launch 'in two to three years'.

But he said he did not think the service would be ready to launch this year due to limitations with current IT systems.

Labour MP for North Somerset Sadik Al-Hassan was speaking at an event in Parliament this week when he said community pharmacy needs to choose 'where it sits as a profession' and where it can 'add value'.

Though he suggested that pharmacists should be careful of treading on the toes of other professions when seeking to expand their role.

Pharmacist prescribing service 'a good aspiration' but can't happen this year

Speaking on Wednesday at a PharmaTech roundtable, Mr Al-Hassan told attendees: 'I think the community pharmacy prescribing service is a good aspiration.'

Building on his comments about the inadequacy of Pharmacy First IT systems in time for its launch, he added: 'I don't think we can do it this year, because the system will need to have interaction on a read write basis with community pharmacy, we'll need to have information that the GPs currently hold on the patient we're going to diagnose.

'And we need to have consistency across pharmacy, because you can't walk into one pharmacy and get the service and then walk into a another pharmacy and not [get it], because that undermines the trust that the patient has for the service delivery.'

But he said a community pharmacist prescribing service would be 'possible' and 'desirable' within two or three years.

The scope of the service should not be limited 'by what we do currently', he added.

'We should be thinking about what it could be. It could be also including prescribing based on somebody's genome, the tech isn't that far away,' he said.

Sector needs to decide on its professional boundaries

In developing a pharmacist prescribing service, 'pharmacy has to be careful about its professional boundaries', Mr Al-Hassan added.

'Are we the people who diagnose? Are we the people who supply medicines? Are we the people who prescribe?

'And what does that mean for the other people who prescribe, the other people who diagnose?

'Is the future of pharmacy going to be that pharmacists prescribe medicines and make sure people get them safely?'

He told roundtable attendees: ‘We need to have our eye on where pharmacy sits as a profession.'

Although he warned: ‘We have to be careful that isn't in the gaps of other people's professions where we spread ourselves a little too thick.’

'What is it that we're saying and with how many voices?'

Mr Al-Hassan suggested that pharmacy has ‘a greater voice than it thinks’ regarding ‘the pound signs in Stephen Kinnock's chequebook’.

‘Pharmacy has always done quite well at speaking louder than its departmental budget,’ he said.

But he added that the sector needed to decide ‘what is it that we're saying and with how many voices?’

‘We need to decide where pharmacy can add value,’ he added.

As long as community pharmacists were spending the bulk of their time on the ‘tick box exercise’ of dispensing, Mr Al-Hassan said ‘we're never going to take and seize the opportunity of the work that's available to us, that's sitting in backlogs of secondary care, that's sitting in new services, that's sitting in new ways to help patients’.

His comments came ahead of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society opening its vote on proposals to become the Royal College of Pharmacy – a move welcomed by the UK Pharmacy Professional Leadership Advisory Board (UKPPLAB), which was set up to bring together pharmacy professionals and work towards a collective voice for the sector.

Nick Kaye: 'Pharmacists already diagnose' ahead of prescribing service

Other roundtable attendees pushed back on Mr Al-Hassan's comments.

Dr Michelle Tempest, partner of Candesic and Digital Health Council for the Royal Society of Medicine, suggested that pharmacogenomics was currently 'too expensive' to be used at scale in the NHS.

And Nick Kaye, chair of the National Pharmacy Association (NPA), said pharmacists 'already diagnose'.

'I diagnose you when you come in and I sell you something over the counter, even if I'm not a prescriber.'

And as an independent prescriber, 'I'm diagnosing, I'm prescribing and I'm dispensing', he said.

Mr Kaye also suggested that waiting to roll out a service until there was uniformity in delivery across the pharmacy network was unrealistic.

'There isn't uniformity in delivery in any service whatsoever... There are good pharmacies, there are bad pharmacies. There are good GPs, there are bad GPs. Some GPs fit coils, some don't. Some do this, some don't... Why should we be held up by the lowest common denominator?' he said.

And he said that technology could enable transformation for the sector 'if it's remunerated fairly'.