Sarah Wollaston MP visit to Healey's Pharmacy in Brixham

Paul Moloney of Healey's Pharmacy in Brixham hosted a very interesting and successful visit by Sarah Wollaston, conservative MP for the Totnes constituency.    She spent some time with Paul who presented the services currently commissioned by Torbay Care Trust.  These include supervised administration of medicine, smoking cessation, and sexual health services.  Sarah was particularly interested to learn about the process for supervised methadone and the needle and syringe exchange services.  Paul also talked about the potential for community pharmacy to take on more of a clinically focused role particularly in terms of medicines management and his hopes that the NHS White Paper may facilitate that move.

Sue Taylor and Mark Stone spent some time with Sarah talking about their concerns about the future commissioning of pharmacy services and the lack of clarity surrounding the new NHS structures and how pharmacy would relate to local commissioners, whether they were GPs or the new NHS Commissioning Board.  Sarah agreed to raise related questions in parliament if the LPC had specific concerns it would like to see addressed.  She also thought that a future meeting with other MPs and key stakeholders would be useful to hold once more detail was available on the structure of the NHS Commissioning Board and how pharmacy was expected to relate to the Board and other commissioners.