Community pharmacies could be paid for shouldering their share of the urgent and emergency care burden under proposals from England's health regulator.

Monitor suggested community pharmacies could receive a fixed amount for being open to patients, with extra payments for volume and quality, in plans to overhaul urgent and emergency care reimbursement outlined on Tuesday (August 19).

This could enable pharmacists to help provide "better co-ordinated, better quality care closer to home," a Monitor spokesperson told C+D in an exclusive interview on Wednesday (August 20).

Monitor proposed that urgent and emergency care providers should move away from volume-based payments to receive a "substantial proportion" of their funding as a fixed sum.

The health regulator suggested that community healthcare providers such as pharmacies and GP surgeries could benefit from adopting the same payment model. Monitor said the new system would help achieve NHS England's plans to overhaul urgent and emergency care by enabling pharmacists taking on a wider role – answering relevant calls to NHS 111, for example.

 "We're trying to make it one consistent payment across all elements of care. It's been fragmented before – pharmacists are paid in a different way to an urgent care centre," Monitor told C+D.

Monitor highlighted that it was still important to pay pharmacists based on the number of interventions they made to help them deal with "unpredictable fluctuations in demand". Both fixed and volume-based payments would be based on the quality of the service pharmacies delivered, it added.

The plans were just "initial thinking", the regulator stressed, and it urged pharmacists to respond to the proposals to influence future plans. In particular, Monitor called for feedback on what risks the model presented, how it should be implemented for different healthcare providers and which parts of the system should be locally controlled.

Monitor told C+D it expected to release more details about the plans, including examples of how the funding would work, within six months. The plans will develop based on feedback from respondents and will sit alongside NHS England's Urgent and Emergency Care Review.

Pharmacists will be able to give their feedback on the report online until September 9. Anyone interested in getting involved in developing new payment models can email  [email protected].

	Do you think Monitor's proposals could help pharmacies provide patients with urgent care?