Teen pregnancy reduced by pharmacy-led services but more needs to be done, says CPE

Continued investment in youth-informed pharmacy-led sexual health services is ‘essential’ to tackling an increase in teenage pregnancy, Community Pharmacy England (CPE) has said.

While there has been a sustained decline in teenage pregnancy rates over the last 20 years, progress has slowed and the latest available data from 2022 shows a small increase – a ‘caution against complacency’ according to a report from the Local Government Association (LGA).

The report highlights how local government has worked with community partners, such as community pharmacy, to reduce under-18 conception rates.

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It highlights two areas that have been particularly successful with their pharmacy-led sexual health services and youth engagement: Liverpool and Barking and Dagenham.

Liverpool has nearly halved its teenage conception rate – from 35.6% in 2012 to 18.2% in 2022 – through its efforts to improve access to sexual health services.

Liverpool City Council contributed to this by commissioning 18 pharmacies to offer STI testing and chlamydia treatment, and to initiate oral contraception prescriptions for routine contraception. A further 76 pharmacies in the area provided emergency contraception.

Chief officer of Liverpool Local Pharmaceutical Committee (LPC), Matt Harvey, said: ‘Community Pharmacy Liverpool has worked very closely with Liverpool City Council over many years. We were able to steer the sexual health service contract to have a large pharmacy offer.

‘Once the contract was awarded to Axess Sexual Health, we worked collaboratively with the commissioners and the new service to embed multiple services within the city’s pharmacies.’

Barking and Dagenham is another success story, having achieved a 73% reduction in teenage pregnancy between 2011 and 2021 due to collaboration between the council and health partners.

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One such initiative was the commissioning of community pharmacies to provide a condom distribution scheme. The initiative was also inspected by young people, allowing them to shape the service.

Yet despite these positive stories, the LGA report found significant regional disparity in rates of teenage pregnancy across England, with London, the South East and the South West having much lower rates than the North West, Yorkshire and the North East.

The report also identified four key factors that had made progress more difficult in recent years:

• A sense of complacency because the ‘rates are down, so the job is done’;
• The impact of the cost of living crisis;
• The legacy of the Covid pandemic which exacerbated many of the pre-existing problems for services and young people;
• Digital services and social media jeopardising access for marginalised young people.

A nationally commissioned NHS Pharmacy Contraception Service – launched in October – will help to reduce the variation associated with locally commissioned services.

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At an NHS England webinar last month, pharmacy integration lead for NHS England, Kirsty Armstrong, said community pharmacy was now a ‘one stop shop’ for patients’ contraception needs.

And the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) recently launched a new women’s health hub, bringing together clinical resources on managing conditions such as excessive menstrual bleeding, contraception and menopause.