The first national pathway and decision-making tool for patients presenting with headache symptoms is now available online, built to support both GP teams and pharmacy colleagues to offer consistent, good-quality headache management.
It’s come out of NHS England’s Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) programme, developed with a large multidisciplinary group and co-badged by the Royal College of General Practitioners and the Royal College of Pharmacy — so it carries genuine clinical weight rather than being another generic checklist.
The format is designed to be simple to use in the moment: it guides GPs, pharmacists and pharmacy counter staff through assessment, management and treatment options where appropriate, based on national standards and best evidence. Headache presentations are common and can range from straightforward to something that needs urgent escalation, so having a single, standardised pathway that both general practice and community pharmacy are working from should help patients get consistent advice wherever they present first.
Worth doing now: share the pathway with your clinical team, and if your practice already has its own informal approach to headache triage, check it against this one to see where the national version might tighten things up.