Contraception service gets a boost ahead of October expansion

As universities welcome their new student intake during Freshers Week this September, North East and North Cumbria ICB launches a campaign to reinvigorated contraception services in the area. This is ahead of wider changes, set to come in next month, allowing pharmacies to provide emergency oral contraception. Emily Warner reports

Universities across North East and North Cumbria are the target of a reinvigorated contraception service with a ‘new, focused campaign’ and an oral contraception services toolkit led by the area’s NHS.

Its aim is to ‘raise awareness of women’s health options across the region while also highlighting the extended role pharmacies can play in supporting these needs’.

Kate Huddart, deputy director of medicines and pharmacy for North East and North Cumbria integrated care board (ICB), spoke to The Pharmacist about the scheme.

‘We’ve been looking at improving women’s health from all different angles,’ she says. ‘The reason for promoting the contraception service now is that it’s ahead of Freshers Week, so all the students are coming back to university. Younger women are moving into different environments, and access can often be a problem because they may not be registered with the GP.’

The accessibility of pharmacies, and their extended hours, give women more flexibility and the contraception scheme is a ‘huge opportunity’ for pharmacists to revolutionise women’s healthcare, she adds.

‘It’s endless to me what our experienced community pharmacists can provide – we’ve been looking at HRT as well and wider sexual health services. There are some very remote areas in Northumberland and County Durham but there’s a pharmacy in nearly every village.’

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Pharmacy Contraception Service

The campaign is timely as big changes are about to take place for the Pharmacy Contraception Service (PCS).

Originally commissioned by NHS England as an Advanced service, on 23 April 2023, it gave community pharmacists the power to supply ongoing oral contraception. In December 2023 it expanded to include both initiation and ongoing supply of oral contraception.

In March this year the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) announced that pharmacies would be able to provide oral emergency contraception (EC) via Patient Group Directions (PGDs).

This is set to take effect on Wednesday 29 October 2025  according to Community Pharmacy England, with NHS England yet to confirm the exact date.

According to Tees Valley Local Pharmacy Committee (LPC) more than 96% of pharmacies in the area are now offering women a supply of oral contraception without needing to see their GP first.

Contraception scheme ‘a huge opportunity’

The biggest barrier North East and North Cumbia ICB has faced, isn’t staffing or logistics, but simply spreading awareness for the scheme. However, this year has seen a huge uptick in the number of contraception consultations occurring across the region. ‘We’ve got really good growth,’ Ms Huddart says, but she’s also unwilling to stop until the ICB reaches 100% awareness of the service.

An oral contraception services toolkit, produced by North East and North Cumbria ICB, has been sent out to health partners, local authorities, universities, collages, GP practices, and pharmacies, she tells The Pharmacist.

It contains contraceptive pill graphics and short videos for use on social media, contraception posters, and a pop-up banner.

Work is also being done within universities to promote the service. Northumbria University said a local pharmacist would be attending its Fresher’s Fair, providing specific information about this topic.

Now is a good time to promote pharmacy contraception service

Experienced community pharmacist, Peter Horrocks, chair of Tees Valley Local Pharmacy Committee (LPC) tells The Pharmacist that it’s ‘great to see leadership from the ICB promoting the contraception service to the rest of the system’.

He has been delivering the contraception service for more than a year, and although it ‘took a bit of getting up to speed’, he says that GP practices are now more likely to refer patients needing contraception to pharmacies.

There are some logistics required to manage ‘workflow’ in the pharmacy, as contraception initiation consultations can take longer than regular Pharmacy First consultations, he suggests.

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‘Where you can see the benefit [of the service] is when you get a patient referred who has tried to get an appointment at their usual destination for contraception and realised that there’s no appointments available. That’s where they slot in to the pharmacy service fantastically and then they are really grateful,’ he says.

Now is a particularly good time to be promoting the service because a ‘significant number of pharmacies’ are signed up to provide it, and the number of consultations is growing, he adds.

Emergency contraception rollout in October

This month, CPE published a briefing document on ‘The NHS Pharmacy Contraception Service – What’s changing?’ ahead of the provisional rollout date (29 October 2025).

The biggest shift is the expansion of the service to include oral emergency contraception. All consultations ‘must be verbal and provided from the pharmacy premises’, the document says. The service can also be delivered by ‘suitably trained and competent’ pharmacy technicians.

At the moment, the availability of emergency contraception depends on where the patient is. In many areas, local services have been commissioned by local authorities to provide emergency contraception free of charge but this is not the case everywhere, CPE told The Pharmacist. This could contribute to health inequalities.

In March, Alastair Buxton, CPE director of NHS services, told press that: 'Not all pharmacies do provide the locally commissioned services – that may be down to the what the local Commissioner can afford. A lot of those [current local] services have rules around what age group of women can access emergency contraception and which cannot, which makes it difficult for pharmacy owners who cover different areas to get their head around the service.'

Another change places greater emphasis on recording information – particularly related to any safeguarding actions and chaperone details – and the briefing also mentions the addition of drospirenone to the progesterone PGD.

This will be a smooth transition for a lot of pharmacies in the North East and North Cumbria region according to Mr Horrocks, because many pharmacies are already locally commissioned to provide emergency contraception.

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However, the introduction of a national specification ‘will support tackling health inequalities through providing wider access to contraception services’, according to CPE’s briefing document.

‘It will also support high-risk communities and vulnerable individuals by providing an integrated sexual health service from a pharmacy of their choice with no requirement to be registered with a GP,’ it adds.

Mr Horrocks, whose pharmacy already provides a locally commissioned emergency contraception service, says: ‘I think it’s good because it creates a unified approach to emergency contraception, regionally and nationally.  If we have pharmacists come to work in the pharmacy from a different area, hopefully now they’ll be [familiar] with delivering that service because it’s national rather than a postcard lottery.’

Ms Huddart agrees that ‘a national service specification is much easier to manage and more consistent across the patch’.