Health secretary promotes Pharmacy First scheme
Victoria Atkins visits a Boots pharmacy in central London to promote a new NHS scheme which urges patients to visit their pharmacy for common conditions without seeing a doctor. The health secretary claims that through the scheme there can be “up to 10 million” fewer GP appointments each year. Report by Blairm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00 [Background chatter]
00:12 Today sees the third part of our plan to make our NHS and social care system faster, simpler
00:18 and fairer with the announcement of Pharmacy First. As of today, more than 95% of pharmacies
00:25 around the country will be offering this service so that if we have seven of the most basic
00:30 conditions including things like a sore throat or earache, rather than go to your GP, you
00:35 can pop into your pharmacist, they can check you out and they're able to prescribe medication
00:40 for you if that is what is needed. And this is amazing news because it's great news for
00:45 us as patients, but it's also great news for pharmacists and GPs because not only are we
00:50 using the expertise of pharmacists to the top of their licence, but we will also, through
00:55 this scheme, free up to 10 million GP appointments each year. I've just heard this morning that
01:01 the very first customer walked through a Boots in North Humber at 8.31 this morning to use
01:06 this service. So the more that we can help people understand that for those seven conditions
01:11 they can pop to their pharmacy, the sooner we will see a real change to GP appointments.
01:17 And of course this is on top of the investment that the government has put in to help with
01:20 things like telephony services across GP appointments, which meant that this year we met a manifesto
01:27 pledge to create 50 million more GP appointments since 2019. And what that means in practical
01:34 terms is 44 appointments, new appointments, more appointments a day in your average GP
01:40 practice.