Eluned Morgan, Minister for Health and Social Services
The 10-year pharmacy plan, Pharmacy: Delivering a Healthier Wales, was published in 2019 and sets out how services need to be transformed and how the workforce needs to develop to meet the needs of people in Wales.
The Royal Pharmaceutical Society has been reviewing the significant progress made against the 15 goals set for 2022 and has been engaging with pharmacy professionals to refresh the vision and to set new goals for the next three years.
The new goals, which are published today, set the expectations for what more can be achieved collectively by 2025. These goals are ambitious, people-focused and designed to harness the contribution of the entire pharmacy team, in all care settings.
We continue to work towards the original aspirations set out in Pharmacy: Delivering a Healthier Wales:
- To enhance patient experience,
- To develop the workforce,
- To deliver seamless pharmaceutical care; and
- To harness the benefits of innovation and technology in pursuit of our aims.
Excellent progress has been made to deliver these aspirations in all sectors of pharmacy practice. Since the introduction our new community pharmacy contractual arrangements, which were described in Presgripsiwn Newydd last year, we are ensuring community pharmacies consistently provide the widest range of clinical services people and the NHS in Wales need.
Approximately one in five community pharmacies are now providing our national pharmacist independent prescribing service, which offers prompt access to treatment for a range of conditions and to regular contraception. We are working to increase this so the service is available in one in three pharmacies by the end of March.
Pharmacy professionals play an essential role in our hospitals and GP practices and we have recently commissioned the Royal Pharmaceutical Society to review how the clinical skills of pharmacists, pharmacist prescribers and the wider pharmacy workforce can be used effectively in hospital settings to improve people’s health outcomes.
The new goals mean that by 2025, pharmacy teams will feel empowered to make every patient contact count, building on strengths of community pharmacies as community assets, as sources of both social capital and convenient access to the services people need.
By continuing to increase the capability and skill within pharmacy teams we will also ensure people have consistent access to highly trained and motivated members of the pharmacy workforce.
Optimising the knowledge and skills of pharmacy professionals as medicines’ experts, we will ensure they are integral in supporting people as they transition between different parts of the health and social care service.
Increasing use of automation will increase the capacity for pharmacy professionals to deliver outstanding care, and using the NHS app, pharmacy teams will work with patients who are empowered to take greater control of their health and medicines.
A great deal has already been achieved. As we embark on the next phase of the journey, pharmacy professionals will achieve even more in the next three years. I am therefore delighted to endorse the pharmacy profession’s refreshed plans.
Pharmacy: Delivering a healthier Wales (rpharms.com)
2025 Goals Wales Vision brochure.pdf (rpharms.com)