The new budget allocated to primary care recovery plan services including Pharmacy First is intended to be spent in full, unlike the previous £645m ‘upper limit’, Community Pharmacy England (CPE) has said.

And community pharmacist prescribers could begin to use their skills within the next year or so, the negotiator suggested.

CPE director of NHS services Alastair Buxton gave the update to the Sigma 2025 conference via video link this morning.

Speaking about the £215m funding for primary care recovery plan services announced in the latest contract, including Pharmacy First, Mr Buxton said ‘the minister has been very clear that that budget has to be spent, unlike the 645m when we didn’t have that commitment'.

Earlier this year, CPE confirmed that an estimated £296m of the £645m primary care recovery plan pharmacy fund announced in May 2023 was 'absorbed by the NHS for other purposes'.

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Mr Buxton previously revealed that the £645m budget was not ringfenced for Pharmacy First, and said NHS England had told the sector: 'This is money that we will spend as we see fit. If you earn it, you get it, but it's not your money.'

Informal discussions on prescribing between CPE and government

Speaking at the Sigma conference today, Mr Buxton also revealed that CPE has had ‘informal discussions’ with NHS England (NHSE) and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) on the community pharmacist prescribing service, but has not yet begun detailed negotiations.

He said that introducing prescribing as an option for existing prescribers to use when they might otherwise be using a patient group direction (PGD) was ‘obvious low hanging fruit’ that CPE was keen to introduce in the next year or so, as well potentially adding more conditions to Pharmacy First.

He said CPE was also keen to give prescribers the ability to amend prescriptions.

In the future, he suggested that weight management could be a potential local or national commissioned prescribing service.

Recent national headlines about the potential to use community pharmacy to deliver NHS weight management services ‘demonstrates a direction of travel from government which is positive’, Mr Buxton suggested.

Mr Buxton also gave more detail on other elements of the recent Community Pharmacy Contractual Framework (CPCF) agreement.

Pharmacy technicians will be able to use smoking cessation PGDs

Mr Buxton noted that patient group directions (PGDs) for two smoking cessation medications will be added to the service ‘later in the year’.

And he confirmed that trained and competent pharmacy technicians will be able to operate under those PGDs when they are introduced.

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PQS aspiration payment closes this week

Mr Buxton drew contractors’ attention to the pharmacy quality scheme aspiration payment deadline, which is this Friday at 11.59pm.

He said this year, the PQS clinical audit would focus on antimicrobial stewardship and the Pharmacy First sore throat service.

And he also revealed that enhanced DBS checks for pharmacists and pharmacy technicians would form part of the patient safety element of the scheme, bringing community pharmacy in line with most other healthcare providers and with most locally commissioned emergency hormonal contraception services.

New medicines service

Mr Buxton noted the split fee for the new medicines service (NMS), which he said had been introduced to incentivise follow-up appointments.

Previously, only around half of patients who received an initial consultation also received a follow-up, likely due to difficulties getting hold of the patient, CPE said.

He suggested that the NHS had wanted the fee for the follow up to be higher but CPE had managed to agree a 50:50 split.

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Blood pressure and ABPM

Mr Buxton also highlighted amendments made to the eligibility criteria to the hypertension case-finding service, which he said was to guard against inappropriate referrals and use of the service.

And he noted that take-up of the Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring (ABPM) was a ‘concern’ for CPE.

‘We need to start thinking about how we can tackle that because there’s clearly a clinical issue and a reputational issues as well,’ he said.