TY - JOUR T1 - Hypertension care: sharing the burden with pharmacists JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 458 LP - 459 DO - 10.3399/bjgp18X698573 VL - 68 IS - 675 AU - Christopher E Clark AU - Laura Sims Y1 - 2018/10/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/68/675/458.abstract N2 - Hypertension affects the majority of people >60 years of age, making blood pressure measurement one of the most common reasons for patients to consult in primary care.1 Opportunistic blood pressure measurement also has merit, due to the well-established evidence linking uncontrolled hypertension to adverse cardiovascular outcomes.The majority of patient-facing hypertension care is delivered by doctors and nurses in general practice settings. Recent initiatives have seen pharmacists developing both their pharmacy and their practice-based workplace roles in new models of primary care. Therefore, considering pharmacists’ potential to extend their involvement in hypertension-related patient care is timely.Pharmacists undergo 4 years of undergraduate training and 1 year as a pre-registration pharmacist. They develop expertise in medications with a focus on safe prescribing and dispensing. Development of their diagnostic skills and clinical reasoning has, appropriately, been secondary to this. Hypertension is, for most people, an ostensibly asymptomatic condition. Therefore, hypothetic-deductive reasoning and pattern recognition (required for clinical care in undifferentiated illness) are not required to the same extent in hypertension care, as in other aspects of clinical care. Likewise, the management of hypertension is driven by algorithms in national guidelines, which give much clarity and certainty in this area of clinical care. Thus, training pharmacists to extend their roles in hypertension care may be more straightforward, in comparison to other clinical areas that demand complex diagnostic skills and management of uncertainty.2The mainstay of hypertension management is medication intervention. Pharmacists are likely to have the necessary knowledge to identify potential medication risks, such as side effects, drug interactions, and polypharmacy. In addition, for autonomous practice, pharmacists will need … ER -