Pharmacists are calling for the ability to add information to patient care records, saying it would improve links between high street pharmacies and primary care colleagues.

Community pharmacy teams were granted access to read patient notes due to the covid-19 crisis.

Royal Pharmaceutical Society Scotland board chair Jonathan Burton says its disappointing that they had to wait until a pandemic for this change to happen.

But he tells healthandcare.scot now is the time to ensure such progress continues.

“What I would say as a practising pharmacist but also a professional representative is its vitally important going forward we enable pharmacists to have some form of not only read access to records, but write access too.”

Scotland’s pharmacies were left as almost the last ones standing when it came to providing walk-in healthcare as the rest of the health service prepared for a huge influx of covid-19 cases.

“We are often the front door to the NHS,” explains Mr Burton, “and it’s very frustrating not to be able to feed very important information to GP colleagues, to dental or optical colleagues – so access to populate notes with important information is really valuable and we need to move towards that.”

“As somebody who represents the profession, I’ve been involved in the lobbying activity trying to ensure access to records for pharmacists is appreciated as a real cornerstone and an essential element of the care that we provide to the community.

“I think we just need to crack on from here to gather information about how pharmacists are using that facility and ensure it becomes a part of the landscape.”

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