Contractors who "stick with it" and commit to services including the new medicine service (NMS) and MURs despite the tough financial environment will reap future benefits, PSNC chief Sue Sharpe has promised.

The 2013-14 contract settlement would be "difficult", Ms Sharpe told the Avicenna Conference in Sri Lanka last week, and it could see cash shifted away from "simple" supply and towards service provision.

"We have, as you know, a very cash-strapped NHS, and securing more money for community pharmacy when all other parts of the NHS are being asked to work within a reduced budget is not going to be at all easy," the PSNC chief executive said in a pre-recorded video presentation. "I think we are going to have a very difficult financial settlement."

"Stick with it. It's going to be a difficult year financially but I think the future is looking quite positive" Sue Sharpe, PSNC

Pharmacy has key role in saving NHS £238m Pharmacy services development hit by time pressures PSNC reveals new NMS payment structure

But ministers were "very positive and very supportive" of community pharmacy and had a "clear ambition" to redirect funding from dispensing volume to services that could be reflected in the contractual framework from as early as 2013-14, Ms Sharpe added. "We may see some changes in the funding delivery this year to provide more funding directly towards those pharmacies who are providing services and away from the pharmacies that are simply still continuing to provide a dispensing function," Ms Sharpe told delegates.

Despite this, there was unlikely to be an overhaul of the contractual framework for at least "the next couple of years" while the NHS Commissioning Board, which will take over contract negotiation from the Department of Health under the NHS reforms, "gets its head around community pharmacy", she said.

Community pharmacy needed to use that lag period to make a case for its role in the future NHS, particularly through advanced services, Ms Sharpe said. "It's going to be really important that we continue to provide services with enthusiasm and particularly that we can demonstrate that targeted MURs and the NMS really do contribute to effective patient care."

She concluded: "My message to all of you is really: stick with it. It's going to be a difficult year financially but, for those of you who really do commit to providing services, I think the future is looking quite positive."

Sue Sharpe on...

Pharmacy numbers: "The NHS is asking difficult questions about how many pharmacies it needs for the future... We need to make sure that between us – [PSNC] in our role at a national level, but also you in terms of the services you're delivering at a local level – we make the case for a strong network of locally situated pharmacies that really offer good healthcare for their communities."

The need to adapt: "The pharmacies that don't adapt to the services role are going to find it increasingly difficult – possibly not in the next year or two, but beyond that."

The 2013-14 contract negotiations: "There's a lot to negotiate for us... As the responsibility for commissioning transfers – in the main but not in total – from the Department of Health to the NHS Commissioning Board, I think we will want to have completed the basic negotiations around COSI [the cost-of-service inquiry] in advance of that... So my expectation is that the serious business will get under way in the late spring and early summer of this year."

The branded medicines patent cliff: "We're going to see the risk of very considerable levels of surplus profit margin and that's a problem for all of us because, as we know, any surplus margin has to be recovered."

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