Yorkshire pharmacies have been offered "significantly lower" fees than practice nurses to provide flu vaccines this year, Community Pharmacy West Yorkshire (CPWY) has reported.  

The local pharmacy group hit out at NHS England's West Yorkshire team for failing to accept its bid to provide vaccines at £12.63 each, which would include service delivery and vaccine costs. This was similar to the estimated fee commissioners pay to practice nurses, CPWY calculated.  

But NHS England West Yorkshire offered a 40 per cent lower fee of £7.63 for delivering the service and buying the vaccine. The standard trade price for GSK flu vaccine Fluarix is £5.39 per dose.

NHS England said 100 pharmacies in the area had signed up to offer the vaccine for the fee it offered and it was continuing to talk to the remaining pharmacies about providing the "vital" service.

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	CPWY's chief executive Robbie Turner said the fee would be below the costs incurred by many of the area's 546 pharmacies and forecast it would lead to an "inequity of services across West Yorkshire".

Mr Turner said he was "disappointed" the West Yorkshire area team had not recognised the cost of delivering a high quality flu vaccination service or the health benefits that could be realised with adequate funding.  

"During one of the riskiest winters for our urgent care system and A&E, I thought that increasing access to flu vaccination as widely as possible would be a priority," he told C+D. "Paying pharmacies a fair fee would have helped towards this."  

The deal was branded "unfair" by Devon LPC's project pharmacist Mark Stone. Pharmacists had secured the same rate as other practitioners to provide the flu vaccine in a pilot across 30 Devon pharmacies, he said.  

Community Pharmacy Greater Manchester said its fees were on a par with GPs. The area delivers vaccines through 690 community pharmacies, which span 10 clinical commissioning groups. Chairman Peter Marks said the offer in West Yorkshire was unreasonable and he would "absolutely not" agree to provide the vaccine at that fee.  

NHS England also offers pharmacists the same rate as GPs in London and Wessex.  

NHS England West Yorkshire said it recognised pharmacy flu vaccination was a "vital piece of work" that would help keep patients well and reduce the number of emergency hospital admissions.  

PSNC's head of NHS services Alastair Buxton said a national approach to flu vaccination services would benefit patients, pharmacies, commissioners and the NHS.  

He said PSNC had raised the issue of local disparities with NHS England and Public Health England, and attributed the lack of national service commissioning this year to the "relatively immature state" of the new NHS organisations after this April's reforms.