Community Pharmacy England (CPE) has revealed it plans to ask for more of the £645m set out as an investment in the sector last November to be used to offset wider cost pressures facing the sector.

When the highly anticipated Pharmacy First common conditions service was launched in England, it was backed by a £645m 'investment in the sector'.

This was to include funding for IT systems, Pharmacy First marketing and consultations, as well as the pharmacy hypertension and contraception services.

Some £112m of the funding was also used to write off 'over-deliveries'.

Speaking to delegates at the Avicenna Heathrow conference last weekend, Alastair Buxton, CPE's director of NHS services, said the negotiator was 'continuing to push in the current round of negotiations' for any further surplus funding unspent from the £645m to be used to do more 'things like that'.

He said: 'I think we all recognise that the totality [of the £645m] is unlikely to be spent.'

Mr Buxton told delegates that NHSE was 'quite clear' about its views on the £645m and had said: 'This is money that we will spend as we see fit. If you earn it, you get it, but it's not your money.'

Mr Buxton said that was not how the negotiator saw it, with CPE viewing the funding as 'a budget that should be spent on a community pharmacy in whatever way'.

'But unfortunately, the NHS continues to have black holes financially all over the place, and I suspect our colleagues at NHS England could kind of spend that and any under delivery of the £645m many times over the next few months. So, it is a challenge to get them to commit to spending more, but we will continue pushing for this,' he said.

Funding spent on IT and marketing but may not have had much impact

Also at the Avicenna conference, Mr Buxton suggested that while some of the £645m funding had been spent on public awareness campaigns about the service, local actions taken by pharmacies may have had a greater impact than the NHSE marketing campaigns.

'They spent some of the £645m earlier on this year on the PR campaign, and they're going to do it again, it's being repeated with some changes to make clear the age criteria, for example, for different conditions.

'But did that have an impact? Did you see an impact? Or actually, are people walking into the pharmacy that you're running doing so because of actions you've taken at a local level? I think generally that is the case,' Mr Buxton told contractors at the conference.

And he suggested that NHSE needed 'to do more' in terms of driving people to the service.

Mr Buxton also noted that while some of the funding had been used to set up IT systems underpinning the service, issues with this had been 'really challenging' and 'painful' for contractors.

But he suggested that IT suppliers 'arguably hadn't had enough time' to put systems in place before the January launch of the service, which he said was decided by 'a political imperative'.

Although Pharmacy First launched in January, the functionality to allow pharmacies to send 'structured' updates about Pharmacy First consultations to GP records was only rolled out to ‘most pharmacies’ this summer.

But around two-thirds of general practices have turned it off over workload fears, a survey by our sister title Pulse suggests.