Could it be a bacterial infection?

Community pharmacy teams are used to questioning patients as part of decision-making and risk assessment when someone presents with symptoms and signs of an infection. For the most part this has involved referring the patient to the GP practice when the pharmacist believes antibiotics might be needed. 

Community pharmacists in some parts of the UK have been able to supply antibiotics through condition-specific PGDs for several years. Narrowing down and pinpointing likely bacterial infections is a skill that many community pharmacists have developed. The Pharmacy First clinical pathways include key diagnostic symptoms/signs and sometimes scoring systems to support this process (see Table 2).