The role of dispensing is “undervalued, underappreciated and under threat”, according to a new report by the Company Chemists’ Association (CCA) published today.
It has urged “immediate investment” to secure the “future benefits of dispensing and the community pharmacy network”.
It said dispensing accounts for 85% of community pharmacy funding in England and remains “a fundamental part” of the “transition” over the next five years in the government’s 10-Year Health Plan.
And it warned unless the gap between the cost of dispensing and what the NHS currently pays for it is closed, it will “likely lead to more harm to patients and increased costs to the taxpayer”.
Read more: IN FULL: Pharmacy to ‘transition’ from dispensing to clinical services by 2030
The report highlights the single activity fee increased by 21p from its introduction in April 2017 to April last year, with inflation rising by almost 35% over that period.
It added more than one in four pharmacist roles are “vacant in some regions” as the full-time equivalent community pharmacy workforce “decreased by 2% between 2017 and 2024”.
Read more: Timeline: The NHS 10-year plan for pharmacies at a glance
This “adds to the chronic underfunding of the sector” as the shortage of staff drives up the cost of the existing workforce as “providers compete to attract and retain staff”.
CCA chief executive Malcolm Harrison said “mounting pressures” are threatening community pharmacies ability to provide “high-quality healthcare”.
“Decades of underfunding have weakened the sector, and without urgent investment and reform, patient access to essential services will be at risk,” he said.
Benefits
Dispensing maintains patient safety, said the CCA, with pharmacists preventing over 610,000 prescribing errors last year which “also deliver significant savings”, estimating the errors would have cost the NHS nearly £600m each year.
It says that for every £1 spent on a pharmacist intervention, it avoids £281 in hospital admission costs or £8 in relative GP costs.
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Pharmacies procuring medicines on behalf of the NHS saves taxpayers over £750m each year, despite the rise in medicine expenditure and per-person usage from 2014 to 2024.
The volume of NHS-prescribed medicines has increased by 17% in the last decade too, exceeding 1.15bn medicines a year in England.
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It also said dispensing offers an “equitable and accessible healthcare interaction” as over 90% of people in England live within a 20-minute walk of a pharmacy. Patients also visit community pharmacies “up to 12 times more frequently than their GPs”.
Safe steps
The report calls for steps to “safeguard and strengthen” dispensing. The CCA called for expansion of the independent prescribing training and career pathways to help capacity and “attract future talent”.
It said the workforce should be supported through empowering pharmacists to resolve prescribing errors, use flexibilities to manage medicine shortages, and “update supervision rules” so pharmacy technicians can support “safe, efficient dispensing”.
Read more: Pharmacist warned for dispensing generics amid ‘lack of supply’
The CCA also call for pharmacists to access a “single, shared patient record” so they can “support informed decisions and make interventions visible across care settings”.
It said using “real-time clinical data and digital tools” will “further enhance safety”.
It comes as IQVIA revealed at the HDA conference last week that of the top 20 dispensed medicines last year, 13 had a drug tariff price of £1 or less.
