NHS England guidance on using the NHS 111 service to direct emergency supply requests to community pharmacies is “very timely”, PSNC has said.

The guidance, published last week (March 16), was designed to ensure the phone service allowed patients to "receive appropriate urgent repeat medication according to clinical need”.

PSNC head of NHS services Alastair Buxton said the guidance built on the experience of a number of LPCs around the country, which had “worked with NHS 111 and clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) to implement a seamless emergency supply service at NHS expense”.

“This is a situation that we would like to see replicated nationally. It makes sense to both patients and the NHS for people needing urgent medicines supplies to go directly to pharmacies,” Mr Buxton told C+D on Friday (March 20).

The national audit of emergency supplies, which launched in some pharmacies on Monday, should produce data to help the negotiator make the case for the commissioning of similar supply services to those described in NHS England’s guidance, he added.

In the guidance document, NHS England suggested that the codes used by NHS 111 to determine the urgency of a medicines supply should be updated and mapped against local pharmacy services and opening hours.

Signposting callers to a pharmacy normally resulted in low attendance rates, as patients would often ask for an out-of-hours GP instead, NHS England said. But using pharmacists in NHS 111 call centres to manage repeat prescription requests at peak times had been “effective” at encouraging patients to visit a pharmacy, NHS England said.

It also suggested using the NHS Mail system to securely refer patients and their call data to a pharmacy. The pharmacist could then use this information to make contact with the patient and then send a message to their GP confirming the supply had been made, NHS England added.

In 2013, an NHS England report recommended that community pharmacy should be incorporated into the NHS 111 service so the "untapped potential" of the profession could be exploited.