‘Tis the season for sore throats, including the exasperating ones that just won’t go away.
But how can you tell if persistent chest pain is simply a cold that just needs time to go away or a nasty infection that requires antibiotics?
Now you won’t have to wait for an appointment with your impenetrable GP to find out.
NHS England’s new Pharmacy First service allows local pharmacists to prescribe medicines for a range of easy-to-treat conditions, including infected bites, shingles, urinary tract infections and some sore throats.
Now MailOnline can reveal the simple test pharmacists use to determine if your sore throat is bad enough for you to receive prescription medication.
The test, developed by NHS England, gives patients a score out of five depending on the presence of five symptoms and their severity.
Symptoms include fever over 38°C, pus in the tonsils, swollen tonsils, and no cough. Patients get an extra point if they visit the pharmacist within three days of symptom onset.
This is because those with symptoms that have been around for a while may have an underlying problem that requires a referral to a specialist.
The NHS England First Pharmacy Patient Group Directive gives pharmacists instructions for prescribing medicines to patients to free up GP space.
If patients score above four, pharmacists will ask how severe the pain is; If it is mild, you will be told to take paracetamol. But if it is severe, they may prescribe a five-day treatment with the common antibiotic penicillin, as long as the patient is not allergic.
The guidance also states that before even considering treatment for a chest or throat infection, pharmacists should consider warning symptoms for other, more serious conditions.
These include scarlet fever, glandular fever, an abscess behind the tonsil known as angina, and some cancers.
The test is only used for adults and children over five years of age, excluding pregnant women under 16 years of age.
Those who are immunocompromised and considered “high risk” for health decline will not be eligible for testing and will instead be referred for specialized treatment.
The Government and NHS England launched the Pharmacy First scheme at the end of January in a bid to ease pressure on GP services.
Recent data from a month-long survey of people’s experience of the NHS revealed that less than half of patients in England were able to see their GP face to face.
Only a third of patients surveyed were able to see their GP on the same day they sought help, while only a fifth said a telephone or online appointment was enough to address their health problems.
It comes after more than 98 per cent of GPs in England backed the British Medical Association’s (BMA) strike proposal to set a limit of 25 appointments per day per GP.
Pharmacists can now prescribe medications for a limited range of common ailments, including infected bites, shingles, urinary tract infections and some sore throats.
Helen Morgan MP and Liberal Democrat health and social care spokesperson argued that the country’s primary care services are “at breaking point”.
“Patients are left completely out of options and instead let their problems worsen when they can’t get the care they need,” he said.
Meanwhile, high street pharmacies are struggling with declining staff and financial difficulties, forcing many to close, a new report suggests.
Seven in 10 pharmacy owners also regularly report staff shortages, with a tenth forced to close temporarily, according to the survey by industry body Community Pharmacy England (CPE).
The report comes after it was revealed that the number of pharmacies in England is now at the lowest level in almost 20 years, with an average of seven of these vital services closing each week.
More than 1,500 have closed their doors since 2015, leaving only 10,054 open, the National Pharmacy Association warned last month.
At this rate, numbers could fall below 10,000 for the first time since 2005, when there were 9,872.
Boots has closed branches en masse in recent months, while LloydsPharmacy has closed its doors entirely.