Neighbourhood health starts here

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As the NHS builds its radical vision for neighbourhood health, one truth is clear: without community pharmacy, the model will remain incomplete. Community pharmacy is not an accessory to neighbourhood health — it is its foundation stone. 

Today’s NHS is undergoing seismic change. The shift towards integrated, place-based care is reshaping how we think about health and care delivery. Yet while “neighbourhood health” features in countless strategies, its meaning often remains abstract.

Strip away the jargon and it’s simple: it is about enabling people to live well in the places they call home, supported by care teams that know them. In essence, the NHS is returning to its roots – but with a modern understanding of population health and prevention.

If neighbourhood health is to succeed, one truth must be faced head-on: community pharmacy is not a peripheral actor in this story. It is the accessible, relational and clinical engine that will make neighbourhood health real.

Gap to be filled

Across the country, integrated care systems (ICSs) are defining what neighbourhood health should look like. Multidisciplinary teams are linking general practice, local authorities and voluntary organisations. Data is being shared, pathways mapped and alliances built around prevention, early intervention and self-care. But there is a gap.

Too often, community pharmacy sits outside the conversation, referenced in strategy and rarely integrated in practice. It is an omission that weakens the entire model. Without pharmacy, neighbourhood health risks remaining an administrative ideal rather than a lived experience.

Neighbourhood health depends on accessibility, continuity and trust – three qualities that define the pharmacy network more than any other part of the NHS.

Neighbourhood anchors

Walk down any high street and you will find a pharmacy where other NHS services are thinning out. These are not anonymous health hubs – they are neighbourhood anchors. 

Open when others are closed, they welcome people who may not feel comfortable in a GP practice or hospital clinic. This proximity is not incidental – it is pharmacy’s superpower. Every pharmacy visit is a small act of prevention, a moment of advice, reassurance or early intervention that strengthens neighbourhood health.

Every interaction – a medication query, a blood pressure check, a chat about a cough or nicotine replacement – is a micro-moment of public health. These are not isolated exchanges. They build familiarity, trust and continuity – the ingredients that can prevent illness before it escalates. Neighbourhood health starts here, in the everyday rhythms of pharmacy practice.

Outdated supply narrative

An outdated narrative still shadows the sector: that pharmacy’s primary role is supply. The reality is that community pharmacy has evolved into a clinically active, patient-facing service that bridges gaps no other part of the system can fill.

Pharmacists now vaccinate, prescribe, manage chronic conditions and provide structured support for smoking cessation, contraception and hypertension. These are not marginal services. They are clinically significant interventions that change outcomes. However, delivery remains fragmented.

Services are often localised, inconsistently commissioned and reliant on short-term funding. The NHS neighbourhood model offers a route out of this inconsistency. By embedding pharmacy within neighbourhood teams, we can turn these clinical touch-points into a coherent, integrated offer that improves outcomes and reduces inequalities.

Imagine a neighbourhood health system where a patient discharged after a cardiac event is automatically referred to their local pharmacy for medication review, smoking cessation support and blood pressure monitoring – all within days, not weeks. That’s the scale of impact pharmacy can bring when the system connects the dots.

Integrating pharmacy into neighbourhood teams isn’t optional – it is the missing link between hospital discharge and healthy recovery.

Aligning with NHS transformation

The NHS transformation agenda is built around three ambitions: prevention, proximity and partnership. Community pharmacy aligns naturally with all three.
• Prevention: Pharmacies already do it. They intervene early, spotting signs of poor adherence, uncontrolled blood pressure or worsening asthma long before crisis hits
• Proximity: The NHS talks about “care closer to home”. Pharmacy already delivers it: 90 per cent of people in England live within a 20-minute walk of a pharmacy
• Partnership: Pharmacy is the bridge between the NHS and public. It is where policy meets reality, where health ambitions become conversations people can understand and act upon.

Neighbourhood health cannot simply be built around general practice and community nursing. It requires the integration of every professional who contributes to prevention and continuity – and that means pharmacy must move from the margins to the mainstream.

Formalise, fund and integrate

Neighbourhood health will define the next decade of the NHS. It is an opportunity to build a system that is preventive rather than reactive, local rather than centralised and relational rather than transactional. Community pharmacy is already doing much of what neighbourhood health aspires to achieve. The task now is to formalise, fund and integrate that contribution.

The future of the NHS will not be decided in Whitehall or at ICS board tables. It will be decided in the conversations happening every day across thousands of pharmacy counters – where prevention begins, trust is built and neighbourhood health truly takes shape.

The NHS doesn’t need to invent neighbourhood health. It just needs to recognise where it’s already happening – in community pharmacy.

• Johnny Skillicorn-Aston is external relations and communications consultant at health services transformation agency Conclusio. Next we explore the barriers and enablers to unlocking pharmacy’s full contribution to neighbourhood care.