The Committee’s report, Food and Weight Management: Modernising obesity treatment, calls for obesity to be recognised as a lifelong, relapsing and remitting condition. The report also recommends a modern service framework, with greater capacity, simpler patient pathways and better training for healthcare professionals.
The PDA supports this direction. New treatments, including GLP-1 medicines such as Wegovy and Mounjaro, provide important opportunities for people living with obesity. However, as the Committee recognises, these medicines are not a ‘silver bullet’ and will not be suitable for everyone.
Effective weight management involves more than access to medicines. Patients need appropriate clinical assessment, treatment options, monitoring, and ongoing support within a sustainable care pathway.
Pharmacy can make an important contribution
Pharmacists are well placed to contribute through their medicines expertise and increasingly clinical role. Weight management could provide an important opportunity to make greater use of pharmacists’ clinical skills while supporting the wider prevention agenda. Pharmacists in community pharmacy and/or in many GP practices are already providing clinical services to patients and could potentially undertake this activity.
However, expanding clinical services requires the right infrastructure. Pharmacists need sufficient capacity to undertake assessment, prescribing, monitoring, and follow-up safely, supported by an appropriate pharmacy skill mix.
It also requires consideration of different workforce models. Greater use of multiple-pharmacist models, supported by appropriately skilled pharmacy teams, could help create the capacity for pharmacists to provide more complex clinical care without simply adding new responsibilities to existing workloads.
One way to support capacity would be for pharmacists to participate in a community of practice delivering weight management services, coordinated by the Integrated Care Board (ICB). This could enable expertise and clinical capacity to be shared across the system, with common standards, peer support, and more integrated patient pathways. The approach reflects the PDA’s Wider than Medicines policy proposal for a joined-up community of pharmacy practice.
As pharmacists take on more clinical responsibilities, the PDA also believes the pharmacist workforce and its representatives should have a meaningful voice from the outset in the design and development of new services. This can help ensure that services reflect the realities of practice and are safe, deliverable, and sustainable.
Balancing ambition with available resources
While the Committee has set out a welcome ambition, delivering it at scale will be considerably more challenging within a finite NHS budget.
Potential demand for weight management treatment is substantial. Policymakers will therefore need to consider not only expenditure on medicines, but also the workforce and clinical capacity necessary to support patients safely.
Investment in prevention and effective weight management could bring important longer-term benefits for patients and the health service. However, those potential benefits do not remove the immediate challenge of funding services while the NHS faces competing demands for its resources.
Pharmacy could be an important part of the solution, but pharmacist capacity should not be regarded as unlimited or available without additional investment.
The PDA believes a modern approach to weight management provides an important opportunity to improve patient care, support prevention, and make greater use of pharmacists’ clinical skills. However, the scale and pace of implementation must be realistic about available resources, with investment in medicines balanced by investment in the workforce, skill mix, and clinical capacity needed to provide those treatments safely and effectively.
Learn more
- Indemnity cover for pharmacists involved in private online prescribing clinics is available from the PDA
- Wider than Medicines
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