Pharmacies facing huge losses amid an impending ban on new medicine service (NMS) subcontracting need to “turn it into a positive” and “take on a team centrally”, NAPC advisor and former president Ash Soni has said.
As part of the new 2025/26 pharmacy contract announced in March, Community Pharmacy England (CPE) laid out plans to change NMS requirements to “clarify that the service cannot be subcontracted to another provider” as soon as “practically possible”.
Last month, contractors told C+D that the regulatory change will mean “a big dip” in the number of NMS completions, leading to losses as high as £7,000 per month – particularly for small independents.
Read more: Pharmacies face ‘huge’ losses amid NMS subcontracting ban
But speaking to delegates at the annual Sigma conference this week (May 14), former Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) president Soni said that they could look at “the decision to remove outsourcing…in two ways”.
“One is out of pain, because it means I’ve now got to do some of it internally myself and I can’t compete with major multiples in the way they operate it,” he said.
“The other is…why do we use [subcontractors] at all?” he added.
“Call centre” team
“Why don’t we just take on a team centrally that can sit in an office,” Soni suggested.
He said an internal team could use data on “the NHS App [and] through various sources using artificial intelligence (AI) to data extract”.
“Make sure [that is] all they do – it’s a call centre that just phones every patient,” he added.
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“Sometimes what you are losing actually you’re gaining and you need to think about how you turn it into a positive,” he said.
Last month, Pharma Services managing directors Tahmid Zaman and Arbaz Mohammed told C+D that the pharmacies they work with will struggle to hit the number of completed NMS they achieved before without subcontracting, meaning they will be claiming for less money.
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Mohammed added that pharmacy owners are subcontracting their NMS because they are too busy and it takes “the burden off them”, while patients are “very happy” a healthcare professional is chatting to them about their medication.
“The burden will go back on” pharmacy owners and financial pressures and stress that they were already facing are “only going to increase”, he said.
And Zaman stressed that the impact “will always be patient safety” as “these are patients who would never be spoken to about their medications”.
