Community pharmacies could offer cholesterol testing and treatment under expanding NHS pilot

Community pharmacies could play a much bigger role in preventing cardiovascular disease by offering cholesterol testing, risk assessments and potentially prescribing treatment, a leading NHS England clinical director told delegates at CVRM Professional Care 2026.

Helen Williams, National Clinical Director for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at NHS England, revealed that a pilot exploring an expanded role for community pharmacies was being rolled out to 100 sites across the country.

Speaking at the event on Wednesday, October 21, she said the initiative could help improve access to cardiovascular care by allowing patients to receive more preventative services closer to home.

She said: “This session is really focusing on the opportunity for community pharmacy to contribute to the CVD prevention, CVRM agenda.

“So we’re really looking at expanding the blood pressure checks programme to incorporate cholesterol testing using point-of-care testing, calculation of a QRISK score, and then, if they’re prescribers, even to the point of initiating lipid-lowering therapy.”

Helen was speaking during a joint presentation with Jagjot Chahal, Cardiovascular Prevention Lead Pharmacist at Barts Heart Centre, and Paul Wright, Consultant Pharmacist in Cardiovascular Medicine at Barts Health NHS Trust.

The session, From Hospital to High Street: How ELOPE is Re-engineering CVD Prevention Through Practice Based and Community Pharmacy, explored how the NHS could make better use of pharmacists to identify cardiovascular risk earlier and improve access to treatment.

The initiative, which began in North East and North Central London, is now expanding nationally, with the aim of demonstrating how community pharmacies can become more closely integrated into neighbourhood healthcare services.

Helen, who is also Consultant Pharmacist for Cardiovascular Disease at South East London Integrated Care System, said: “The goal is really to enhance access for patients, to give them care closer to home, give them opportunities to access care in different ways, and ultimately improve their cardiovascular health.”

The presentation formed part of wider discussions around the NHS Cardiovascular Disease Modern Service Framework, which sets out an ambition to reduce premature deaths from heart disease and stroke by a quarter within a decade.

Delegates heard that progress in reducing cardiovascular mortality had stalled between 2010 and 2020, with 2020 seeing the first increase in deaths from cardiovascular disease in many decades.

The presentation also highlighted significant health inequalities, with cardiovascular mortality twice as high in the most deprived areas compared with the least deprived.

The framework aims to tackle these challenges by improving early identification of people at risk, optimising preventative treatment and ensuring patients with established cardiovascular disease receive the support needed to achieve recommended treatment targets.

A key focus is cholesterol management, with the framework calling for more proactive identification of untreated risk through population health data and targeted assessments.

It also highlights the importance of increasing access to lipid lowering treatments for people at high cardiovascular risk, alongside regular monitoring and treatment intensification for those already diagnosed with cardiovascular disease.

The speakers outlined how community pharmacies could support these ambitions by building on existing blood pressure services to offer cholesterol testing, holistic cardiovascular risk assessments and targeted outreach to underserved communities.

Pharmacists could also provide lifestyle advice, refer patients into general practice or agreed local treatment pathways and support ongoing medicines adherence.

Where appropriate services are commissioned and suitable governance arrangements are in place, independent prescribing pharmacists could play a more direct role in initiating treatment.

However, Helen stressed that the expanding programme was still at an early stage and that evidence would be needed before the approach could be adopted more widely.

She said: “So this work is actually sort of proof of concept. It’s a pilot at the moment, started in North East and North Central London and expanding out now to 100 sites across the country.”

She added: “So what we hope is that it will demonstrate the evidence of the benefit of community pharmacy linking into neighbourhood healthcare to support better opportunities for patients to access care.”

Looking further ahead, the Modern Service Framework also identifies opportunities to improve cardiovascular prevention through digital health technology, artificial intelligence, more personalised risk assessments and new treatments.

These include using NHS App services and wearable technology to support ongoing management, expanding neighbourhood testing and exploring advances in genomics to identify people at increased cardiovascular risk.