World Pharmacists Week: Statements Dail Éireann — 2026-09-24 ============================================================ David Cullinane (SF), Waterford I welcome the opportunity to speak today. I thank the Minister for her contribution. Pharmacists are medicines experts and are among the most accessible health professionals in the State. There are approximately 1,900 community pharmacies providing around 2 million visits every week. Their role has evolved well beyond dispensing and medicines management. Community pharmacies are now involved in prescribing for common conditions, vaccination and wider public health work. Hospital pharmacies are also central to safe and effective medicines use and patient-centred clinical pharmacies where patients have more complex needs. The key point is that we need to use pharmacists to their full potential and integrate pharmacies further into community care. That can improve access, strengthen prevention and medicine safety and reduce avoidable pressure on GPs and acute hospitals. The community pharmacy agreement and the common condition service have been important steps. The common condition service is an important development in pharmacy care and one for which Sinn Féin has advocated. It allows pharmacists to prescribe, on a protocol basis, for eight common conditions, but the work of pharmacy reform is far from complete. The common conditions service still falls far short of universal healthcare because consultation fees are not covered for patients, including medical card holders. Prescribed medicines may be covered in the normal way but the consultation fee itself still has to be paid. If we want to direct more care into appropriate alternatives to GP visits and hospitals, the cost of doing that should not simply be transferred to patients. Government should publish the cost of making essential pharmacy care freely available on the same basis as GP care. More broadly, reducing pharmacy costs for patients should form part of the Sláintecare roadmap. This should include reducing the drugs payment scheme threshold, adding more medicines to the reimbursement list and reforming the GP visit card so that it takes into account other elements of primary care, including pharmacy and dental services. The next step is to make greater use of community pharmacies in chronic disease management and proactive health checks. Pharmacists are still not formally integrated into existing chronic disease management teams. There is scope for a greater role in targeted cardiovascular screening, blood pressure checks, diabetes and cholesterol checks and wider screening and prevention. We in Sinn Féin have proposed a role for community pharmacy in integrated and targeted cardiovascular health screening and management for people at highest risk of cardiovascular disease. Vaccination through pharmacies can also be expanded, including targeted free access to vaccines such as the shingles vaccine. I have read recently that there might be some movement on that issue. It might be something that will be included in the budget, if the media reports are right. I am supportive of a shingles vaccine. I know we have to start somewhere, and a start would be welcome. If is the case that it is in the budget, that would be welcome. Shingles and respiratory syncytial virus, RSV, vaccines targeting those most vulnerable would be really helpful and pharmacists have a role to play there as well. We also need to move towards a full pharmacy prescribing model, within each pharmacist's accredited scope of confidence. The expert task force recommended independent, autonomous, prescriptive authority. At present, pharmacists are limited to protocol-based prescribing for eight conditions. The legislation is in place to support the wider prescribing role but it has not been implemented in full. Expanding the role of pharmacy also requires proper workforce planning. Pharmacists have identified increased workloads, administrative burdens and workforce shortages such as barriers to delivering better care. The wider health service continues to suffer from a lack of strategic workforce planning and underinvestment in training places. Students are also facing exceptionally high points requirements because of the limited number of higher education places, despite the need to train more pharmacists domestically. We need to rejig workforce planning for both community and hospital pharmacy. The South East Technological University, SETU, and University Hospital Waterford partnership is, I think, a good example of the value of regional training hubs. It brings together hospital practice, education and placement, postgraduate training, research and workforce development. Pharmacy already plays a much wider role in healthcare than simply dispensing medicines. The next phase is to build on the community pharmacy agreement and the common conditions service, and moving to universal healthcare must include pharmacy care. That means integrating pharmacy further into primary care, reducing financial barriers for patients, expanding its role in chronic disease management, screening and vaccination, implementing wider prescribing within pharmacists' accredited competence and ensuring the workforce and training capacities are there to support those reforms. I also want to welcome the visitors in the Public Gallery from the Irish Pharmacy Union, IPU. I commend all of those community pharmacists and those who work for them for the role they play in primary and community care more generally. We obviously look forward to continuing to support the evolution of the role that pharmacists play in healthcare, including in primary and community care more generally. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-24/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:50+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-09-24