Pharmacies in England carry out one million consultations a week

Pharmacies in England carry out one million consultations a week

PSNC has recently published the findings of the Pharmacy Advice Audit, showing the huge number of informal patient consultations that community pharmacies are carrying out and the positive impact those consultations are having both on patients and other healthcare services.

In June and July 2020 more than 9,400 pharmacies in England took part in PSNC’s audit to try to quantify and explore the informal patient consultations happening in community pharmacy – these are consultations happening outside the Community Pharmacist Consultation Service (CPCS) or any other commissioned services.

Pharmacies recorded their patient consultations over a single day and in total 198,043 patient consultations were recorded.   49% of patients in the audit said that if the pharmacy had not been there they would have visited their GP for health advice.  This would equate to approximately 492,000 additional GP appointments each week.  You can read the full report or a summary of the key findings here