Uptake of Pharmacy First is highest in the “most deprived quintile”, the “first-ever large-scale analysis” of the service’s consultations in GP records has revealed.
The research, published on July 9, used health record analysis platform Open Safely to analyse “more than 26 million electronic health records from patients at 2,540 general practices” between January 31, 2024 and January 30, 2025.
Researchers identified over 400,000 Pharmacy First consultations for over 340,000 patients and found that 67% of the service’s users were female, 59% were aged below 40 and 71% were of white British ethnicity.
Read more: Revealed: GP referrals to Pharmacy First saw slight increase last year
They also noted an improvement in the clinical information recorded in Pharmacy First consultations over time, with more than 36% recording a “clinical condition, medication or both” by January 2025.
“Among consultations using the recommended Pharmacy First code, this proportion was over 53%,” the researchers said.
The clinical conditions most frequently recorded in Pharmacy First consultations were acute pharyngitis and uncomplicated urinary tract infection.
Read more: Pharmacies ‘essential’ to high street, say three-quarters of Brits
The research was led by Viveck Kingsley and Milan Wiedemann, who were supported by researchers from the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of Nottingham, University of Manchester and the UK Health Security Agency.
Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science director Ben Goldacre said the Open Safely platform “has opened up new possibilities for collaborative research on NHS GP data”, adding that the software combined “scale, speed and transparency in ways that weren’t possible before”.
And Kingsley said that before the study, “little was known about how Pharmacy First consultations were recorded in GP records”.
Read more: Awareness ‘biggest barrier’ to wider Pharmacy First use
“We were able to analyse Pharmacy First consultation data at scale for the first time, giving us a much clearer picture of how diagnoses and medications are recorded in GP clinical systems,” she added.
It comes after an NHS England survey found that 86% of people have used at least one pharmacy service in the last 12 months.
And it follows a report commissioned by Boots revealing that almost three-quarters of UK adults view pharmacies as “essential” to the high street.
