The NHS England (NHSE) community pharmacist prescribing pathfinders have delivered more than 17,000 consultations so far, NHSE has shared.

Speaking to Clinical Pharmacy Congress (CPC) delegates in London on Saturday (11 May), NHSE representatives shared that as of 6 May 2025, over 17,000 consultations had been delivered through the service so far.

In August 2023, the government launched a pathfinder project to test how different models of pharmacist independent prescribing could work, backed by £12m funding.

And in August 2024, NHS England announced it was rolling out a national clinical system that would allow community pharmacists to generate prescriptions via the NHS Electronic Prescription Service (EPS) and enable pathfinder sites to 'start delivering their clinical services'.

As well as the 17,000 consultations to date, NHSE representatives at the CPC conference also reported that the service had enabled more than 600 medicines to be stopped.

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And more than 8,000 new medicines had been commenced.

Around 2,000 medicines had been changed, NHSE added.

All of these scenarios - a medicine being prescribed, changed or stopped - would have required a GP referral if the community pharmacist service had not been in place, NHSE said.

Speaking at the event, Ghulam Haydar, senior policy lead for community pharmacy transformation and commissioning at NHSE, stressed that the pathfinders were intended to explore how prescribing could be incorporated into wider community pharmacy services. 

‘Independent prescribing itself isn’t a service, it’s a bolt on,' Mr Haydar told CPC attendees.

He shared that the University of Manchester would undertake a qualitative evaluation of the service.

And the next phase of the service would see NHSE develop commissioning frameworks to support both national and local commissioning of community pharmacist prescribing.

This guidance might include template contracts, and guidance around governance, digital and technical requirements, Mr Haydar said.

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He also said he was keen to incorporate case studies within this guidance so that the system could learn from what had worked best within the pathfinders.

He was joined by speakers who had been involved in one of the pathfinder sites in North East London.

Community pharmacist Jignesh Patel highlighted the 'very close' relationship he had with local GP surgeries and ICB support as critical to the success of his site.

While he said that working with GP practices and getting them involved would be a challenge for many community pharmacies, he said that relationships with and access to the GP team was 'very important' for the success of community pharmacist prescribing.

‘Community pharmacist prescribers can become spokes to PCNs and practices in the neighbourhood team,' Mr Patel suggested.

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Anne Joshua, head of Community Pharmacy Strategy at NHS England, who was chairing the panel, commented after Mr Patel's presentation: 'We’re all trying to work out what integrated neighbourhood teams will look like: here’s an example, in my view.’

And she suggested that while relationships between pharmacists working in the community and in general practice had historically been difficult, she 'would really like to see that growing'.

Speaking today at the Sigma 2025 conference, Community Pharmacy England's director of NHS services Alastair Buxton said CPE wanted to introduce prescribing as an option for existing prescribers to use when they might otherwise be using a patient group direction (PGD) in the next year or so.