How much are pharmacies paid?

 

The fees pharmacies can claim for offering a smoking cessation service vary depending on each service specification.

Under the Smokefree City & Hackney model, pharmacies, GP hubs and community clinics are paid £6.25 for setting a quit date with a patient, with an additional fee if the patient is still on the programme after four weeks.

Meanwhile, those offering the Help Me Quit service can claim for a raft of fees including £4.98 per NRT item, £14.95 for an initial consultation and £11.69 for each patient who is confirmed to have quit after five consultations.

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Under the SCS, contractors can claim a £1,000 set-up fee as well as £30 for a first consultation, £10 for an interim consultation and £40 for a final consultation.

Mr Damani says his pharmacy offers patients various products under the service.

These include NRT, nicotine patches, gum, lozenges, inhalators, mouth spray and microtabs.

E-cigarettes “may be an option eventually”, too, he adds. However, at the moment the team can only advise patients that they could be useful in helping them quit, he explains.

The most important thing is providing “behavioural support plus the medication to go with it”, he notes. This is because “if a smoker says [they] want to give up and you just sell [them] the patches and say, 'There you go, bye," they are very likely to relapse or not succeed”, he adds.

 

How to target patients

 

Mr Damani says the pharmacy has put “posters in the window” to promote the service and the entire team tries to “target patients at every opportunity”.

He adds that looking at what sort of purchases customers are making over the counter (OTC) has often been a way in to the conversation as well.

For example, if a patient has come in for cough mixture because they are coughing a lot, the team doesn't ask directly if they smoke, but do ask whether anyone in the patient's family does.

This has often prompted the patient to admit that they are a smoker, giving the team a way to promote the pharmacy's smoking cessation service and “trigger" the patient's interest in the service, Mr Daman says.

Knowing the pharmacy's patient demographic has also been really helpful, he notes.

Read more: The latest on smoking cessation in community pharmacy

Smoking is prevalent in the local Turkish population so the team made a Turkish version of the smoking cessation form and “captured a lot of patients” that way, he explains.

Carys Spencer is a pharmacist and manager of Pontyclun Pharmacy in south Wales – which is one of five pharmacies in the Llanharan Pharmacy Ltd portfolio of pharmacies.

She says she has kept community engagement high with the pharmacy's smoking cessation service by promoting the annual stop smoking campaigns with a dedicated window display and promotional material near the counter.

The team also tries to refer any patients looking to buy NRT over the counter. “My staff and I know the community so well so we can have those conversations,” she adds.

Like Mr Damani, Ms Spencer says she and her team try to pick up on anybody trying to buy cough medicine and if she or the team thinks someone might be a smoker, they try to build information about the service into the conversation.

She provides both level 2 and level 3 components of the Help Me Quit service, which consists of a 12-week supervised programme, behavioural support and NRT.

 

Footfall picking up

 

Mr Damani says his pharmacy saw between five and 10 patients a week between two advisors for the service pre-COVID-19 and it is just picking up again now.

He finds it really satisfying helping people in this way, particularly as he is a recent ex-smoker himself and can put himself in their shoes.

Mr Damani makes it clear to patients that “we will hold [their] hand all the way through”, which “makes them feel they have someone to talk to and aren’t alone”, he adds.

However, the offer of help isn't limited to a one-off period of 12 weeks – another 12 weeks of support can be provided if necessary.

Meanwhile, Ms Spencer says that, on average, her pharmacy's smoking cessation service helps three or four patients per month, although she notes that the new year is a "busier" period.

 

Working with others

 

Pharmacies can also join public health campaigns such as Stoptober to help their patients stop smoking.

Ms Spencer says she has taken her smoking cessation knowledge further afield and has tried to take best practice from non-pharmacy organisations as well.

Having heard that Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) Wales was looking for pharmacists to help support its awareness sessions, Ms Spencer hosted “a couple of sessions in Bridgend College targeting younger people who were smoking”, she says.

She hosted a similar session at Amazon's Swansea distribution centre, "where people were working shifts so [were] not regular users of community pharmacy”.

If ASH Wales thought a patient was suitable, it would signpost them to their nearest pharmacy offering smoking cessation “if [they were] interested in quitting”, says Ms Spencer.

For example, she says she spoke to a young pregnant woman in Bridgend, who was unsure as to whether she could use NRT. Speaking with the woman meant "I could encourage her to get it sorted”, she explains.

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Working with local GP surgeries is also really important, according to Mr Damani.

Many GP surgeries no longer offer their own smoking cessation services, and so they signpost patients to other advisors in the community “like us”, he says. 

Mr Damani recommends leaving referral forms in local GP surgeries, which is an approach he has taken.

If anyone does want to quit smoking, they can fill the form in with their name and number and the surgery “passes [those] on to us in the pharmacy”, he says.