Key Summary
- The 2025 Prospectus wants community pharmacies to be natural home for patients for routine primary care services
- The proposals include expanding Pharmacy First, by increasing the range of conditions the service covers
- Commissioning all NHS vaccination programmes from community pharmacy
The Company Chemists’ Association has launched its 2025 Prospectus, which proposes that community pharmacies should be a natural home for patients for routine primary care services.
The prospectus, launched at the CCA’s inaugural Conference held in London on Thursday (11) is based on extensive research and modelling undertaken by the CCA.
The proposals would provide an additional 51 million primary care appointments annually, allowing general practice to focus on more complex primary care needs.
The 2025 Prospectus sets out an ambitious roadmap for community pharmacy to take on an even bigger role in delivering urgent care, managing long-term conditions, and preventing ill-health.
The proposals include expanding Pharmacy First, by increasing the range of conditions the service covers and moving to a prescribing service as pledged in the Labour Party’s manifesto.
Empowering pharmacists to initiate treatment for high blood pressure, building on the success of the NHS Community Pharmacy Blood Pressure Check Service, before moving towards screening and initiating treatment for most routine long-term conditions.
Commissioning all NHS vaccination programmes from community pharmacy so that patients can receive a whole range of vaccines at their local pharmacy, including flu, COVID, HPV, shingles, and pneumococcal.
Commissioning a wrap-around NHS weight loss service and a ‘walk-in’ smoking cessation service.
Allowing pharmacists greater flexibilities to substitute medicines during shortages, making changes to medicines to support adherence, or changing medicines to align with prescribing guidelines, or indeed deprescribing, where necessary.
The prospectus states that a transformation of this kind will require several enablers to deliver the services.
It called upon funding to address historic deficits, and investment in the sector to commission additional workload and new services, in turn giving pharmacy businesses the confidence to invest.
Encourage businesses to invest in their premises, providing bigger pharmacies and more consultation rooms for patients, by ensuring pharmaceutical needs are undertaken by NHS commissioners rather than Health and Wellbeing Boards, which are susceptible to local pressure.
Ensuring community pharmacy has access to the proposed Single Patient Record and the NHS App integrates with pharmacy businesses’ own systems.
Giving pharmacies access to phlebotomy capacity to ensure that they can provide a wider array of clinical services.
Commission new, funded clinical care to benefit from the changes to ‘supervision’ and independent prescribing.
CCA chief executive Malcolm Harrison said, “Pharmacies are well positioned to manage a wider range of common conditions, administer more vaccines, and provide wrap-around weight loss care, amongst other things.
By taking forward these bold proposals, pharmacies could free up 51m GP appointments each year, allowing GPs to focus on patients with more complex care needs”.
National Pharmacy Association chief executive Henry Gregg said, "This is an important report and demonstrates that if the government invests in community pharmacy, it delivers great outcomes for patients and takes pressure away from the wider health system."
