PharmacistsCaring for your health

Pharmacists do more than just dispense medicines.

Greater role

Pharmacists now have a much wider role than just being a traditional dispenser of medicines. Many are taking on roles more commonly associated with a GP – giving advice on minor ailments such as hayfever, prescribing medicines, and checking for health problems and conditions such as diabetes.

You’ve also told us that, in the future, more of you would consider getting tests and advice at the pharmacy. Currently, only 6% of members surveyed get tested for long-term conditions, but 43% would consider it looking ahead.

The danger of absent pharmacists

All of these new services in our pharmacies may mean that the pharmacist is often away from the counter. There are UK-wide plans to allow pharmacists to leave the shop for up to two hours at a time, with their staff in charge.

But we question whether these changes are sensible, given that our investigators were four times more likely to get unsatisfactory advice from sales assistants, and one technician (a more senior member of staff), for a relatively common condition – traveller’s diarrhoea.

Staff training

Sales assistants have to be trained to give advice or sell medicines, but our three experts were worried about the advice received.

‘Some counter assistants aren’t listening or don’t understand what the customer is telling them,’ said one expert. ‘Although some showed how it could be done well, others appeared to have had inadequate training.’

But we were pleased that all but one of the requests for emergency contraception involved a pharmacist, and even the one that didn’t was assessed by our experts as ‘very competently handled’.