NHS England (NHSE) pharmacy integration lead Kirsty Armstrong has acknowledged that the body needs “to do more” to promote the Pharmacy First service.
NHSE has “learned that the public don’t wholly understand everything pharmacy can do”, she said, highlighting that it must “do more to raise public awareness because that will drive better delivery of services”.
Armstrong’s comments – made at the Pharmacy Show in Birmingham last week – come as the negotiator today (October 20) reminded pharmacy teams that their “first 2025/26 national health campaign” to promote the Pharmacy First service has begun.
Read more: Pharmacies must ‘promote’ PF service via national campaign
Community Pharmacy England (CPE) last month revealed that pharmacies had been tasked with promoting the Pharmacy First service to the public as their first national campaign topic under this year’s contract.
Armstrong reiterated that NHSE has “recognised” that it needs to “raise public awareness”, explaining that both of this year’s contractual pharmacy campaigns will promote the service and will be “coordinated” with a national media campaign “due to go live later this month”.
Read more: Pharmacy bodies unite to slam ‘sneering’ GP letter
“You’ll recognise this campaign,” she told delegates, noting that the commissioner is “reusing the same assets” as previous years.
NHSE wants to “reinforce that message and make it clear to patients that this is the same thing”, she said, adding that patients will “have seen it already” and will be “familiar” with the material.
“Minor updates”
According to CPE, the first pharmacy campaign – which launched today – will run until November 9. The second will take place between February 2 and 22 next year.
It stressed that “all pharmacies need to participate in the campaign...to promote the Pharmacy First service to the public”.
And CPE added that NHSE’s own promotion of the service will use advertising “based on the creative content” from the last two national campaigns but with “some minor updates”.
Read more: NHSE relaunches Pharmacy First marketing campaign with ‘minor revisions’
It comes after CPE director of NHS services Alastair Buxton told C+D last month that asking pharmacies to run a campaign “makes absolute sense”.
Meanwhile, NHSE previously relaunched its national Pharmacy First marketing campaign in November, with just “minor revisions” to the original material published several months before.
Read more: ‘Pull your socks up!’ CPE slams new ‘one-off’ Pharmacy First media campaign
But CPE called for it to be part of a “much bigger ongoing public awareness campaign” at the time amid concerns about the way the service had been promoted.
And in August last year, CPE said the NHS needed to be “pulling its socks up” when it came to promoting Pharmacy First – branding the campaign previously put out by NHSE as “not very effective”.
