NHS England (NHSE) will consult with the pharmacy negotiator on a national community pharmacy prescribing service from April 2026, it has been announced.
The news comes within a letter from NHSE to integrated care boards (ICBs) around the next steps for the community pharmacy pathfinder programme, which is due to come to a formal end on 31 December 2025.
The programme, established in 2023 to test how independent prescribing by pharmacists could work in community pharmacy settings, has seen more than 33,000 patient consultations across 164 pharmacy sites. According to NHSE, more than 59,000 of consultations have resulted in prescribing interventions that otherwise would have been done by a GP or hospital.
As the programme comes to an end this year, NHSE vowed to use learnings from the pathfinders to ‘look at future clinical services from community pharmacy in line with the 10 Year Health Plan’.
‘The ambition is to widen patient access in primary care, ensure medication safety, improve prevention of ill health and integrate pharmacy professionals across neighbourhood health services,’ it said in the letter.
‘We will share these insights with regional and system leaders as our plans for 2026-2027 and beyond take shape, subject to confirmation of Spending Review allocations.’
In setting out a timeline, NHSE said it would continue to provide programme support to ICBs that want to continue pathfinder activity during a ‘transition period’ until the end of March 2026 (see box).
And from April 2026 onwards – ‘post-pathfinder’ – NHSE said it would be consulting with Community Pharmacy England (CPE) to ‘determine what will form any part of a national service offer’.
A national evaluation of the pathfinder programme will be published by NHSE – though it is not yet confirmed when this will be.
‘We will set out a framework for commissioners to support the governance and assurance of prescribing in community pharmacy,’ the letter said.
‘We will send out further communications once these outputs have been finalised.’
Speaking at a Pharmacy Show panel session last month, Wasim Baqir, head of pharmacy integration at NHSE, said the pathfinder programme had demonstrated that ‘community pharmacy can be trusted with a prescription pad’.
Meanwhile, NHSE planning guidance, also published last month, promised to ‘maximise’ the role of community pharmacy by embedding ‘pharmacy-first’ approaches and introducing prescribing-based services.
The government’s 10-year plan for the NHS outlined aspirations to ‘increase the role of community pharmacy in the management of long-term conditions and complex medication regimes’.
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