Jeroen van de Pol

175 6 General discussion Alleviation of minor ailments by pharmacists would give GPs the opportunity to focus on patients with more complex complaints. Patients and healthcare professionals (including GPs) are (mostly) unaware of community pharmacists’ knowledge and skills as well as the extent to which community pharmacists can offer CPS [25, 47, 79, 90, 93, 94] and, therefore, also lack knowledge of the added value of CPS provided by community pharmacists. Pharmacists’ professional bodies should thus also explore the possibilities of promoting the general public’s awareness of the role of community pharmacists regarding CPS provision [25, 55, 95]. However, further development of the profession and continuously increasing the quality of services provided by community pharmacists should have the greatest impact on awareness. Moreover, this information must be shared parallel to a promotion campaign. Otherwise, a promotion strategy may be counterproductive. In addition, other healthcare professionals (predominantly GPs) must endorse CPS provided by community pharmacists. Community pharmacists, therefore, need to discuss with GPs how CPS can address the needs of GPs and patients. Moving on: implications for daily practice According to Kotters’ 8-step change model, after barriers have been removed, short-term wins need to be generated. The acceleration these short-term wins produce must be sustained to achieve the end goal of actually instituting change [13]. A proposal on how to move on per step is provided in the next sections.