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NHS health checks are an opportunity for €a step change€ in dealing with vascular disease. And community pharmacy has a key role to play in the programme, delegates at the NPA's recent London conference were told (reports Steve Bremer).

€We have not scaled this programme up in community pharmacies as we could do,€ said Professor Kevin Fenton, national director of health and wellbeing at Public Health England. €A key part of our work is opening up and diversifying delivery, so [independent pharmacies] should be confident in going to your local authority to deliver this. And your barriers to entry are lower than many other groups.€

Pharmacy needs to believe in its abilities and develop a 'can do' attitude to delivering effective public health services, said Professor Fenton. €Momentous€ change was happening and he hoped pharmacy would rise to the challenge. The return of public health to local government control created the potential to focus on its wider determinants and develop an integrated, whole system approach.

The Government, Public Health England, the NHS and local authorities were now at the centre of strategy in this area. €Relationships that independents and pharmacies build with these four groups will be key to your success moving forward,€ he told delegates.

However, because PHE was a new organisation, €we can be the disruptive element and we can focus on putting our money where our mouth is. I'm hoping that you will look at PHE as a partner and an honest broker.€

Successful pharmacy flu vaccination services provided scope for innovation and learning among other pharmacies, he continued. Challenges with the transfer of data in large-scale services were being worked on.

Prevention agenda

Pharmacy should embrace the prevention agenda, such as identifying the more than 5 million patients with undiagnosed hypertension. He highlighted a four-week pharmacy study in Wakefield, which referred a quarter of 2,000 patients to their GP with undiagnosed high blood pressure.

PHE is also committed to raise awareness of dementia, with a target of achieving more than 1 million dementia friends by next year. The community pharmacy environment could become more dementia-friendly, with a significant proportion of pharmacies ideally having dementia friends by 2015, he said.

• A new, improved guide to NHS health checks is now available on the NHS Choices website. The interactive guide includes new videos and case studies and highlights a variety of health and fitness apps and trackers that are designed to help people take control of their own health.

The guide will help people understand what the NHS health check is, and crucially, how it can help, says Jamie Waterall, national lead for the programme.