Community Pharmacy England (CPE) chief executive Janet Morrison last week (November 9) revealed that the negotiator still hasn’t “started negotiations” for the 2026/27 pharmacy funding deal.
Speaking at Sigma’s annual UK conference, Morrison explained that “there is a delay” to negotiations as “there is still wrangling going on between the department and the Treasury”.
Read more: NHSE to pilot ‘early career pathway’ for newly registered IPs
Having talked to the Department of Health and Social Care (DH), NHS England (NHSE) and integrated care boards (ICBs), Morrison said that the current climate is “chaotic” and there is “a lot of conflict”.
“There is quite a difficult cultural fit going on between the DH and NHSE that makes it harder to do business with them at the moment,” she said, adding that CPE hopes the situation “will improve”.
It follows Prime Minister Keir Starmer announcing in March that NHSE will be abolished to “return many of [its] current functions” to the DH.
Prescribing service “shopping list”
Morrison also told delegates that CPE has been having “some informal conversations” about what an independent prescriber (IP) pharmacy service “could look like”.
Elements could include the Pharmacy First service “being expanded with additional conditions” and initially using IPs to “replace the patient group directions (PGDs)”, she said.
Read more: NHSE to ‘consult’ with CPE on national prescribing service
But there is also the potential to “[ramp] that up over time” and build on the “particularly successful” elements of the IP pathfinder pilots, she added.
Morrison noted that the “potential shopping list” for a pharmacy prescribing service could also include medicine reviews and deprescribing – “supported by pharmacist flexibilities and substitution” – as well as vaccinations, smoking cessation, hypertension, cholesterol management and respiratory disease.
Read more: NHSE: ICBs to ‘introduce’ pharmacy prescribing services in 2026/27
But there are “quite a few challenges”, Morrison said - including what “assurance and governance you need to run [an] independent prescribing service”.
There is also the question of “what is nationally commissioned and what is locally commissioned”, she added, noting that these are going to be “some really challenging questions for the future”.
“First-class burial”
National Pharmacy Association (NPA) chair Olivier Picard also spoke at the conference about the importance of IPs.
He said that “if we don’t embed independent prescribing” into the next contract, there will be “not just a workforce crisis where everybody is going to work in other parts of the NHS” but also a “first-class burial” of the sector.
Read more: Morrison: Risk services must be ‘stripped out’ if funding short
“My plea to Janet [Morrison] is to make sure that when [CPE negotiates] the next distribution of money, some of it goes to independent prescribing”, Picard said.
“If I was on the committee, I couldn’t vote for a deal that doesn’t include that,” he added.
It comes as NHSE last week revealed that it will pilot an early careers pathway next year to onboard newly registered pharmacists as they join the workforce with prescribing qualifications.
Read more: CPE warns of ‘gloomy outlook’ for next pharmacy contract
And it announced last month that discussions with CPE about a “national service” for community pharmacy prescribing will begin next April.
But Morrison exclusively told C+D that CPE could be forced to tell the government it must “strip” out “core” services if the next contract does not deliver enough funding.
She warned delegates at the Pharmacy Show last month that the outlook for the next community pharmacy funding deal could be “gloomy”.
