TY - JOUR T1 - Pharmacy: finally part of the team? JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - e638 LP - e639 DO - 10.3399/bjgp15X686797 VL - 65 IS - 639 AU - Christine Bond Y1 - 2015/10/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/65/639/e638.abstract N2 - Few changes in pharmacy hit the national news headlines but a recent announcement by the BBC on 17 March reporting that the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) had recommended that GPs should work more closely with pharmacists based in their surgeries drew considerable interest.Should we be surprised? Was it because the proposal was from a profession that has long held turf wars with pharmacists over the right to dispense, or was it because many of the public still view pharmacists as a profession that dispenses prescriptions rather than a profession able to give clinical advice?The last few decades have seen a steady change in the roles of pharmacists and the settings in which they work. To some extent this has paralleled the development of advanced practice and extended roles in many of the other non-medical healthcare professions; this is often perceived to have been driven by increasing pressures on traditional healthcare teams.Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Are these new roles based on rigorous evidence of improved outcomes or are they due to the aspirations of professions whose training has become increasingly academicised? Pharmacy and nursing are perhaps the two professions whose roles have changed most; they became all-graduate professions in 1967 and 2013 respectively. Graduates qualified with ambition and skills that were exploited in innovative ways, which gradually diffused into mainstream practice; in some cases these de facto extended roles resulted in post hoc legislative and regulatory changes, for example, the introduction of non-medical prescribing, which followed the second Crown report in 1999.1 A recently published systematic review2 suggests that, in general, these extended roles are associated with good patient outcomes and high satisfaction.Reflecting specifically on pharmacy, it is pertinent to think back to 1986 and the Nuffield Committee of … ER -