Numark chairman Harry McQuillan has criticised GP leaders for voting to end pharmacy blood pressures checks and singled out Mid Mersey local medical committee member Rebecca Williamson for unfairly suggesting pharmacists do not have the knowledge and information to treat patients appropriately.

McQuillan (pictured) told Independent Community Pharmacist he read about last week’s vote at the British Medical Association’s LMC conference to immediately scrap blood pressure checks in community pharmacies and put the money into pharmacy dispensing fees “with dismay.”

He picked out comments made by Williamson who said during the conference that a failure to fund general practice coupled with the “outsourcing” of services to other providers will heap “more work” on GPs.

“Patient demand has led to knee-jerk reactions to enable, encourage and expect community pharmacies to assess patients without the knowledge and information needed to treat them appropriately,” she said.

McQuillan said: “Let’s unpick that a little. If my colleague is referring to the need for pharmacy teams to have access to a shared clinical care record, owned by the patient, to assist decision-making, I’m 100 per cent behind that.

“If the inference is that pharmacists and their teams are not equipped to provide such services, I would contest that vehemently.”

McQuillan suggested the conference had contradicted itself by, at one point, calling for the “immediate discontinuation of Pharmacy First and (redirecting) associated funding into core general practice,” then urging the NHS to “stop pitting GPs and community pharmacy against each other.”

Hull and East Yorkshire told the conference “the requirement for patient referrals” for Pharmacy First “to come from general practice should be removed.”

Pointing to Pharmacy First in Scotland as evidence of the public’s desire to use the service, as well as its ability to bring “fantastic value for money” and tackle “inequalities in access,” McQuillan said: “The one thing I agree with from the conference was the clear call for the community pharmacy network to be fully funded for the essential dispensing service.

“(This is) an area of common ground that we should build upon and avoid the race to the bottom.”