A study finds that 84,000 advice-only consultations are provided by pharmacies every week

A study of 8 community pharmacies across Scotland carried out by Robert Gordon University, the University of Strathclyde and Community Pharmacy Scotland, discovered that 46% of the eighty-four thousand advice-only consultations, carried out every week, is by pharmacists and forty-one per cent by counter assistants.

Patient questionnaires recorded across the participating pharmacies discovered that seventy-four-point-five per cent of patients believed that community pharmacists were capable of updating and reading relevant parts of the electronic health record. Furthermore, eighty-two per cent of respondents stated that they were assured that community pharmacists could give advice as reliably as a GP.