The role of community pharmacists in public health: a scoping review of the literature

To review the literature, including published and unpublished evidence, around the role of community pharmacists in public health, to identify key themes emerging from these data and to identify gaps in the evidence base. The objectives of the study were met by identifying relevant literature from both the UK and overseas, through electronic database searches and the grey literature. The search was limited to the period from January 1985 to November 2010. The scoping study identified a wide range of roles that community pharmacists were providing in public health, with the dominant themes being in the areas of smoking cessation services, healthy eating and lifestyle advice, provision of emergency hormonal contraception, infection control and prevention, promoting cardiovascular health and blood pressure control and prevention and management of drug abuse, misuse and addiction. The scoping study also identified several barriers and gaps in the UK evidence base. The gaps were significant in those themes with no identified UK studies, such as preventing falls in the elderly, emergency preparedness and response to bioterrorism, climate change and potential pandemics, immunisation and vaccination services and prevention and risk assessment of osteoporosis. There were also gaps in the evidence base regarding the role of London community pharmacists in public health. Although the scoping study identified a wide range of roles that community pharmacists were providing in public health, several gaps and barriers were also identified. Based on these gaps, a study incorporating mixed methods to provide in-depth information about the role of London community pharmacists in public health could be more illuminating.