Upcoming workforce plan must recognise pharmacy teams are essential to neighbourhood healthcare

The government’s long-awaited 10-Year Workforce Plan must recognise that pharmacy teams are central to creating a neighbourhood health service, leading pharmacists have warned.

The workforce plan is expected to be published soon and will set out what staff and skills are needed to fulfil the government’s reform ambitions, including moving more care into the community.

A key part of this shift is through establishing neighbourhood health centres and integrated neighbourhood teams to support patients outside of hospitals, including an increasing role for pharmacy.

Tase Oputu, president of the Royal College of Pharmacy (RCPharm), told The Pharmacist that pharmacy teams must be recognised as ‘central’ to delivering neighbourhood health services.

‘The workforce plan should also support workforce transformation and assurance, moving towards a nationally recognised mechanism to define, assess and assure the advancing capabilities of pharmacists across care settings,’ Ms Oputu said.

‘Pharmacy teams can play an important role in improving access to care and supporting people with long-term conditions closer to home, but this must be backed by sustained workforce investment and long-term planning.’

While pharmacy leaders have previously called for the inclusion of pharmacy teams in workforce planning, there are ‘serious’ concerns about how sustainable the workforce is due to the continued drop in community pharmacist numbers.

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And a recent report from the Company Chemists’ Association (CCA) warned that rising numbers of pharmacists employed in primary care networks through the additional roles reimbursement scheme has had a ‘destabilising effect’ on the community sector.

Ms Oputu said one of the RCPharm’s priorities is making the best use of the whole pharmacy workforce, including developing pharmacists' prescribing services and ensuring pharmacy has a strong voice wherever medicines are involved.

The new community pharmacy contract, last month, will introduce independent prescribing (IP) as an extension of Pharmacy First and the pharmacy contraception service.

The RCPharm said this was a ‘positive step’ for the sector but added that its success will depend on workforce training and capacity.

Meanwhile, the Pharmacists’ Defence Association (PDA) stressed that the upcoming 10‑Year Workforce Plan must move beyond broad ambition and provide ‘concrete, enforceable commitments’ that address the pressures facing pharmacy teams.

It wants to see national standards to improve staff safety and wellbeing, transparent and realistic workforce modelling, and a fully funded education and training strategy that reflects the expanding clinical role of pharmacists.

Pharmacy leaders have recently called on the government to expand financial support for pharmacy students to ensure equitable access to training.

There have also been warnings from policy experts that there is a ‘significant gap’ between reality and the ambition to increase the IP workforce in community pharmacy due to a lack of funding and supervision.

The PDA said: ‘A system wide approach is needed as, without these foundations, the plan risks repeating the cycle of over‑promising and under‑delivering that has contributed to current workforce challenges. Employers will also need to play their part.

‘We expect the plan to set out a clear, properly resourced vision for how pharmacists will be deployed in the shift toward community‑based, preventative and digitally enabled care.’

It also called for investment in digital infrastructure to aid safe prescribing, and for pharmacists to be represented in national leadership and culture-change programmes.

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‘In short, the workforce plan must recognise pharmacists as essential to the NHS’s future model of care and provide the investment and clarity needed to make that a reality,’ the member organisation added.

The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan, published in June 2023, set out ambitions to expand education and training places for pharmacists by almost 50% by 2031/32.

It also aspired to continue growing the pharmacy technician workforce to support growth and transformation across the sector.

But according to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), the new workforce strategy will move away from calculating staff numbers on the basis of existing service models and instead focus on what roles and skills will be required to deliver reform across the health service.

Head of policy at the CCA, Dr Nick Thayer, expressed disappointment that ‘little progress’ has been made in delivering the ambitions of the 2023 plan.

He said: ‘It is frustrating that we continue to move from one plan to the next without enough focus on growing the community pharmacy workforce required to meet rising demand.’

With more pharmacists now working part-time or pursuing portfolio careers, more registrants are needed to maintain the same level of workforce capacity, according to Dr Thayer.

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There has also been a 16% surge in the volume of NHS-prescribed medicines dispensed over the last decade, rising to 1.16 billion items annually.

‘Action is needed to expand workforce supply and strengthen the prescribing training pipeline. This means increasing the number of foundation training places, ensuring there are enough designated prescribing practitioners, and enabling greater efficiency through skill mix, technology, and automation,’ Dr Thayer said.

He also stressed the need to take full advantage of supervision legislation reform if the sector is to meet growing workload without solely relying on workforce growth.

These changes – which come into effect in December 2026 – will allow pharmacists to authorise pharmacy technicians to undertake or supervise the preparation, assembly, dispensing, sale and supply of medicines that would otherwise require supervision from a pharmacist.