There is a picture doing the rounds on Twitter – you may have come across it – that shows what appears to be a poster in a doctors’ surgery. Entitled ‘Support Your General Practice’, it encourages patients to have their flu vaccination at the practice and not a pharmacy because “every vaccination given by pharmacies reduces our income”.

If you’ve had the misfortune in recent weeks to wade through the anti-pharmacist bile that spews out seemingly unabated from GP forums or online comment sections in the medics’ professional press, it rings very true. At a time when relations between pharmacists and doctors at a national leadership level have rarely been warmer, as illustrated by the close working between the RPS and RCGP, the situation pharmacists face on the ground is frequently fraught, territorial and downright obstructive. Collaborative working is far from an everyday reality.

The nascent pharmacy flu vaccination service has had its problems, and pharmacists have joined GPs in expressing concerns about, for example, the lack of a common IT platform that allows accurate and speedy data collection. This lack of an integrated approach again underlines the folly of not aligning the GP and pharmacist contracts more closely.

However, pharmacists are clearly well placed to help meet national uptake targets and, as this year’s London flu scheme already shows (40,000 injections and counting), patients simply love the convenience of going to a pharmacy for their annual jab. Whatever the doctors think, this service is here to stay.

Richard Thomas, editor