Community health pharmacy services cover a wide range of services and provide care for people from birth to the end of their life. Services are mainly delivered in people’s homes (including care homes) but also in community hospitals, intermediate care facilities, clinics and schools.

A community health services pharmacist or pharmacy technician works closely alongside acute hospitals, GPs, community pharmacists, social care, and voluntary organisations to help ensure the best standard of care is delivered to all members of the community through a ‘cradle to grave’ approach. 

There is a vast number of community health services where pharmacy can have a huge impact. These include:

• Urgent Community Response
• District nursing
• Child health services
• Community occupational therapy
• Community paediatric clinics
• Community end of life and palliative care
• Community physiotherapy
• Musculoskeletal therapy
• Pulmonary or cardiac rehabilitation
• Community podiatry
• Community speech and language therapy
• Falls prevention services
• Intermediate care services
• Specialist nurses (for example, diabetes, COPD, heart failure, incontinence, tissue viability)
• Bed-based community rehabilitation
• Wheelchair services
• Health visiting
• School health services
• Sexual health services
• Mental health community
• Virtual wards

To become a community health services pharmacist, you’ll need certain key skills, including strong communication skills and the ability to work as part of a team and across several different organisations and healthcare sectors. You must also be passionate about delivering a high standard of care to patients within their community.

Becoming a qualified pharmacist involves:

• Four years of full-time study to gain a Master of Pharmacy (MPharm) degree
• One year practising full time as a trainee pharmacist 
• General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) registration, which requires each pharmacist to pass an assessment

Once you’re registered with the GPhC, you’ll be able to practise pharmacy professionally, but you’re welcome to join our Community Health Services Pharmacy Community at any time throughout your training to network and learn from leaders in the field.

The role of community health services pharmacy practitioners can be extremely varied, as these professionals play a crucial role in delivering care and advice to all members of a community, from infants to the elderly. The many roles of a community health services pharmacist or pharmacy technician can include:

• Medicines safety, including incident reporting review and action planning
• Development and review of policies and procedures
• Training and education of health professionals, from healthcare assistants to consultants
• Clinical ward based work or management of clinical pharmacists or clinical contracts
• In community-based teams, managing caseloads such as virtual wards, urgent care or rapid response teams
• PGDs development and review
• Medicines procurement
• Medicines management, such as safe storage and custody
• Management of controlled drugs
• Pharmaceutical waste
• Answering bespoke queries from any service within the community health services organisation
• Audits, including site visits and clinical shadowing
• Implementing NICE guidance
• Project and service development to enable new ways of working
• Representation at Integrated Care System level meetings
• Maintaining networks with internal and external stakeholders, such as pharmacists in acute trusts, community pharmacists, GPs, the voluntary sector, hospices and care homes.