Pharmacies must complete PQS clinical audit by end of March 2026

The Pharmacy Quality Scheme (PQS) antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) audit for Pharmacy First consultations can now be carried out, Community Pharmacy England (CPE) has instructed.

The clinical audit will support pharmacy contractors and their teams to reflect on their management of patients seeking treatment for sore throat – one of the Pharmacy First clinical pathways – where the patient has a FeverPAIN score of zero to three.

In May alone, 85,427 Pharmacy First consultations were carried out for acute sore throat, according to the most recent dispensing contractors’ data from NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA).

Completing the AMS clinical audit is a quality criterion in the patient safety domain of the 2025/26 PQS which has ‘focused on supporting good AMS within community pharmacies’ – particularly following the introduction of Pharmacy First, where antimicrobials may be supplied to patients.

Related Article: Payment percentage for statutory branded medicines scheme drops to 16.5%

The audit must be started between 1 September 2025 and 3 February 2026 to ensure there is an eight-week consecutive period for the data collection. The audit should be completed by 31 March 2026.

To carry out the audit, pharmacists must fill in a data collection form after each patient consultation and then a data analysis form at the end of the process to identify any learnings for future practice.

If no patients within the audit sample are identified during an eight-week period, pharmacies can still meet the PQS audit requirements as long as they can evidence that they have made a thorough effort to identify such patients.

Data should be collected on a minimum of 10 patients over a four-week period. However, if data cannot be collected on 10 patients during that time, then the audit period must be extended to eight weeks.

At the end of the audit, anonymised data should be shared with NHS England by adding it to the Manage Your Service (MYS) data collection tool.

The audit standards are:

Related Article: Research review: a look at the latest clinical papers

• That a copy of the TARGET Treating your infection – respiratory tract infection (RTI) for community pharmacy leaflet is used in the consultation and is given to the patient;
• That the consultation provides advice on the natural history and average length of sore throat symptoms;
• That the consultation includes advice on when to re-consult if symptoms persist;
• That the consultation includes the provision of general information on AMS, antibiotic use and resistance;
• That face-to-face consultations with patients with a FeverPAIN score of two or three include an examination of the patient’s throat and neck.

NHS England said in a correspondence published last month: ‘Tackling antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a UK strategic priority, with the aim of reducing the number of serious infections that are resistant to treatment.’

AMR is a ‘serious threat to public health’ it added, heightened by a dwindling number of antimicrobial agents entering clinical practice.

When Pharmacy First launched, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), NHS England (NSHE) and the sector’s negotiator Community Pharmacy England (CPE) said that they would be ‘closely monitoring the Pharmacy First service post-launch, particularly in relation to antimicrobial supply to guard against the risk of increasing antimicrobial resistance’.

In May 2025, the National Pharmacy Association (NPA) found that the majority of community pharmacies (79%) were being asked for unnecessary antibiotics ‘at least once a day’.

Related Article: MenB vaccination programme to be rolled out in pharmacies

A House of Commons report the following month suggested Pharmacy First could help to reduce AMR through the use of diagnostic tools, reducing inappropriate prescribing.

In April, the government also launched a campaign to tackle the threat of AMR in young adults using a mascot character called ‘Andi Biotic’.