Up to £8 million of funding secured for community pharmacy will be used to “support digital developments in 2025 to 2026,” Community Pharmacy England (CPE) and the DH this week (March 31) revealed.
The announcement comes as part of the 2025/26 pharmacy funding deal, which will see the sector receive an extra £481m on 2023-2024 figures – an 18.6% rise.
“DH and NHS England (NHSE) are committed to continuing to work with the sector and IT suppliers to streamline the ‘manage your service’ claim process,” the government said in a letter to contractors.
Read more: BREAKING: New 2025 CPCF funding deal - uplift revealed
It added that it would “streamline” the process for claiming payments “through the use of payment and data application programming interfaces (APIs) for all national clinical services”.
“We have agreed to continue to work to deliver developments for the pharmacy sector in 2025 to 2026 to better support delivery of clinical services,” the DH added.
This includes “the introduction of emergency contraception as part of the contraception service, and patient group direction supplies as part of the smoking cessation service,” it added.
New services
The funding deal announcement also brought the news that the pharmacy contraception service (PCS) will be expanded to make the morning-after pill “available free of charge” at English pharmacies.
CPE said the expansion will begin in October “subject to the introduction of IT updates”, with a consultation fee of £20 “plus the cost of any emergency hormonal contraception (EHC) provided”.
The DH added that the deal included plans to expand the smoking cessation service “to enable the delivery of parts of these services by registered and non-registered pharmacy staff”.
Read more: Pharmacies to offer free morning-after pill from October
“For the smoking cessation service, we have agreed the introduction of PGDs in 2025 to 2026 to enable the provision of varenicline and cytisinicline (cytisine), and for the pharmacy contraception service (PCS) the addition of drospirenone to be supplied under PGD,” it said.
Meanwhile last week (March 27), C+D exclusively revealed that community pharmacies gained access to a patient’s GP record at the point of delivering any NHS clinical pharmacy service.
The “access record” function is the latest in a series of IT developments introduced alongside the Pharmacy First service.
