Delivering nationally-commissioned NHS pharmacy services could generate enough income to pay the wages of an additional staff member, Community Pharmacy North East London chief executive has suggested.

Delivering just 20 NHS consultations each week could generate as much as £451.70, Shilpa Shah told contractors this week at the Sigma 2025 conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.

This would be almost enough to employ an additional member of staff on National Living Wage (NLW) at £12.21 an hour, or £457.88 for a 37.5 hour week.

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This could be generated by the pharmacy completing each week:

  • Five new medicines service (NMS) consultations, generating £140 in total
  • Five Pharmacy First consultations, generating £85 in total
  • Three contraception consultations, generating £75 in total
  • Five blood pressure checks, generating £50 in total
  • And two ambulatory blood pressure monitoring services (ABPM), generating £101.70

Ms Shah also urged contractors to make use of skills mix.

For instance, she highlighted that the blood pressure check could be delivered ‘by anybody that you as a responsible pharmacist feel is competent enough to deliver that service’.

‘So how are you going to ensure that everybody in your team is working to the highest level?... How many of you have trained up [your] pharmacy technicians so they can deliver every PGD in your pharmacy that they're able to, which just frees up capacity for you?’ she asked.

Ms Shah also spoke to the uncertainty around the dissolution of NHS England (NHSE) and cuts to integrated care boards (ICBs).

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She highlighted that NHS commissioning had already evolved from PCTs to CCGs to ICBs.

And she told contractors that the changes did not need to affect their day-to-day pharmacy services: ‘If you carry on doing the great work that you do, you will be recognised, and you will be able to still do all that work without various bodies in place.’

But she suggested that pharmacies should build a close relationship with their local primary care networks (PCNs) to become involved in new neighbourhood teams as they evolve.

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‘If your PCN has a meeting and they invite community pharmacy into it, please do your best to try and go along.

‘Build those relationships with the PCN clinical directors, with the pharmacists that work in PCNs, the nurses, etc, be part of that, show them and tell them about all the great work that you do as a community pharmacist,’ Ms Shah said.