Jeroen van de Pol

174 Chapter 6 these services more often [26]. Thus, providing CPS now leads to an increase in future demand of CPS provided by community pharmacists. An increase in CPS provision by community pharmacists can probably improve the reputation of the community pharmacy profession and create a trusting relationship, in turn increasing the perceived accessibility of the community pharmacy [23]. An increase in CPS provision may also increase the profession’s attractiveness for students currently trained to provide CPS and may reduce the number of community pharmacists leaving the profession because they are unable to provide the CPS for which they are trained. This benefit is especially relevant given the shortages that the profession faces in the (near) future [85]. Proving the added value of CPS to GPs and patients Close collaboration of community pharmacists with GPs seems to yield better healthcare outcomes than usual care provided by community pharmacists alone [86-89]. Furthermore, GPs who had experience with CPS provided by community pharmacists were predominantly positive [90]. It is, therefore, paramount to increase collaboration with the GP when providing CPS, instead of perceiving the community pharmacist as a competitor for the GP. CPS provided by community pharmacists can alleviate GPs’ increasing workloads. The shift from secondary care to primary care currently predominantly burdens GPs, who already experience time constraints. The POINT study provides an example of how pharmacists decreased GPs workload and concurrently improved the quality and outcomes of drug therapy [1, 76]. Both GPs and community pharmacists need to see each other as partners instead of competitors [91]. GPs tend to prefer technical support (such as insurance approvals) from community pharmacists over CPS [92]. However, they are expected to increasingly endorse CPS provided by community pharmacists to patients if this endorsement leads to reduced time constraints for themselves. One helpful way to achieve this goal is to align the reimbursement models for both GPs and community pharmacists. GPs’ positive attitude toward CPS provided by community pharmacists will facilitate implementation of CPS provision in community pharmacy practice [22, 47, 55]. In chapter 4, we explained that a clinical medication review (CMR) by community pharmacists not only improves the quality of care but may even decrease health care costs. Many studies have provided similar insights into the added value of CPS provided by community pharmacists [4-10]. Chapter 5.2 describes the variation in patient preferences regarding more advanced pharmacy services. Therefore, community pharmacists need to offer a wide spectrumof services addressing both needs of (frail) patients with polypharmacy (focus on CPS), but also people without chronic diseases but maybe an incidental minor ailment (focus on convenience).