Clinical pharmacists in general practice

All letters are subject to editing and may be shortened. General letters can be sent to bjgpdisc@rcgp.org.uk (please include your postal address for publication), and letters responding directly to BJGP articles can be submitted online via eLetters. We regret we cannot notify authors regarding publication.

For submission instructions visit: bjgp.org/letters

The recent article by Williams et al estimated that one clinical pharmacist post in Westbourne Medical Centre saves a GP 80 hours a month.¹ Researchers in Dudley determined that 769.6 GP hours were saved by 5.4 full-time equivalent pharmacists over 4 months between September and December 2015.² This equates to one post saving a GP 35.6 hours per month.² We estimated the potential time saved for GPs by tasks being undertaken by part-time pharmacists in three general practices in Canberra, Australia, at 23% from May to December 2017. Assuming that a full-time pharmacist works 37.5 hours per week, our data suggest that 37.4 hours per month of GP time may be saved by one full-time pharmacist.

This comparison suggests that differences in GP hours saved may depend on the different activities undertaken by the pharmacists, their clinical experience, or the different methods of coding activities as a GP task.

Making a cost-effectiveness case for pharmacists in general practice is complex. Using GP hours saved alone underestimates the health economic value of pharmacists in general practice. Other contributions that can be considered include hospital admission avoidance due to safer prescribing,^1,3 reduced drug costs,² involvement in government payments for quality or specific services,^1,4 and improved clinical outcome measures.⁵

We agree that using GP hours saved implies that pharmacists are ‘cheap doctors or expensive nurses’¹ but feel that using GP hours saved will be a necessary component of cost-effectiveness calculations until pharmacists are universally accepted as essential to the general practice team.