What Is Pharmacy's Contribution To Public Health?

In the last ten years much has been written and discussed about pharmacy’s wider contribution to public health that is broader than the traditional supply of health education leaflets, stop smoking products and emergency contraception.  

This broader public health role is based on the 10 core elements of public health practice developed by the Faculty of Public Health and pharmacy examples of public health activities in each area, at either specialist or practitioner level are provided here. 

Note: The Faculty of Public Health has recently revised its 10 core elements of public health practice for Specialists in Public Health into nine key areas.  This change was to align the Faculty’s public health framework with that used by the UK Voluntary Register for Public Health Specialists (www.publichealthregister.org.uk). Anyone interested in becoming a public health specialist should check the training requirements with both the Faculty of Public Health and the Voluntary Register.

Both Scotland and England have formalized the development of a wider public health role for pharmacy through national strategies for ‘pharmaceutical public health’.

All of the UK countries have new community pharmacy contractual frameworks in place which incentivise pharmacies to systematically provide more, and a broader range of, public health interventions than previously.  Many pharmacies, but not all, have been playing this broader role for some time and there is flexibility in the contractual frameworks to allow for differential development of pharmacy public health services.

Examples of public health activities already carried out in community pharmacies under the three domains of public health

Service quality (previously known as Health and social care)
Provide advice on self-care.
Provide advice on how medicines work.
Advise on use of complementary medicines and lay remedies.
Maintain patient medication records.
Promote patient medication adherence.
Provide out-of-hours services.
Provide collection and delivery services.
Carry out domiciliary visits.
Undertake clinical governance.

Health protection and prevention
Advise on vaccination programmes.
Participate in needle and syringe exchange schemes.
Improve AIDS / hepatitis awareness amongst drug misusers.
Provide monitored dosage systems.
Deal with pharmaceutical hazard alerts.
Facilitate safe disposal of waste medicines.

Health improvement – see Table below for examples:

Adapted from: Walker R. Pharmaceutical public health: the end of pharmaceutical care? Pharmaceutical Journal 2000;264:340-2