The continuity of pharmacy services planning guidance, which was published last week (September 25), is designed to help pharmacy owners “plan ahead for all eventualities including staff sickness and COVID-19 lockdowns,” the organisations said.

The 21-page document sets out the “stages of a response to a crisis” for both individual pharmacies and for pharmacies “working together”, the NPA and CCA explained.

“In some circumstances this could include the sharing of staff and stock to maintain essential services,” they added.

The document includes guidance for five “levels” of crisis, from maintaining business-as-usual to navigating “coordinated closures”.

The levels included are: maintaining business as usual with full service provision; implementing changes to protect full service provision; introducing changes to service provision, including operating behind closed doors; temporarily reducing core contracted hours; and coordinated closures.

The guidance “may be used in situations that are either gradual in escalation or acute” and in such cases, it “may be necessary to move between levels in a non-sequential manner”, according to the document.

One suggestion made in the document that pertains specifically to COVID-19 is “partnering staff within the pharmacy so they always work together in agreed teams or groups“.

This will “help reduce infection control risks but will also mitigate against the risk of losing the whole workforce,” the guidance explained.

Another measure pharmacies may want to take is by including pharmacies and local commissioners in “discussions about which pharmacies should lend staff and which should receive staff”.

Each of the four UK nations has been issued a different version of the guidance, which “includes more details than the earlier guidance”, issued jointly in March by the CCA, the NPA, the Association of Independent Multiple Pharmacies and the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee.

“This document is in no way a prediction”

Mark Lyonette, chief executive of the NPA, said the guidance document is “in no way a prediction of what will happen in community pharmacy as a result of a second wave of coronavirus”.

Instead, it should be used to “help everyone in the sector think about contingencies for crises of all sorts, and how they might need to work with one another to maintain services”, he said. 

CCA chief executive Malcolm Harrison said the guidance has been “designed to help contractors think about the steps and actions they should consider taking in emergency situations - including in the current pandemic – to support the community pharmacy network to continue to provide pharmaceutical care to their local communities”.