NHSE has announced that funding for each site employing a foundation trainee pharmacist starting in the 2025/26 summer and autumn start windows will increase to £27,295 per trainee, Community Pharmacy England (CPE) yesterday (October 7) revealed.
The increased payments for the 2025/26 training year will be made “automatically” to all eligible training sites and will include “back-dated payments to the start date of the trainee pharmacist”, it said.
This means that there is “nothing additional” training sites need to do to receive the “uplifted payment”, it added.
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The funding increase represents a 3% rise from the previous amount of £26,500.
According to CPE, the funding for each training post is “a contribution to all costs of hosting a trainee”, which includes supervision, administration and salary costs.
And the funding is “consistent across all sectors of practice and all regions of England”, it noted.
Pay “discrepancies”
The negotiator explained that NHSE has taken on “delegated responsibilities” from the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) for the “delivery and management” of the foundation trainee pharmacist programme (FTPP) in England.
This includes “providing funding” to each site in England with a foundation trainee pharmacist “allocated to it through the national recruitment scheme”, it added.
The decision was made as part of reforms to the “initial education and training” of pharmacists, CPE said.
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It comes after the Pharmacists’ Defence Association (PDA) revealed last month that trainee pharmacists have voiced concerns about “discrepancies” between the advertised and actual salary of some trainee jobs.
In one instance, a trainee “was offered a contract at £23,500 instead of the advertised £24,500 with the employer ‘justifying’ the £1,000 deduction as a cost associated with designated prescribing practitioner (DPP) placement”, it said.
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And it noted that if this trainee “worked more than 37 hours per week”, it is “likely” that the employer would be “breaching the minimum wage regulations at this salary level”.
Meanwhile, a PDA data review revealed in March that large numbers of pharmacy trainees were at risk of being paid below minimum wage.
