NHS England (NHSE) aims to increase the number of patients accessing Pharmacy First each month by hundreds of thousands by March 2025, it announced today.

And it has set targets for tens of thousands more contraception and blood pressure check consultations to be delivered monthly by community pharmacies over the next year.

The commissioner also said it would continue to monitor the uptake of these services by distance selling pharmacies, ‘which have an important role to play in providing wider access to patients via video consultations’.

In an update on its primary care recovery delivery plan, NHSE said that in 2024/25, it aimed to ‘grow the monthly patient volumes across all three pharmacy services’.

By March 2025, the community pharmacy sector would be expected to deliver at least:

  • 320,000 more Pharmacy First clinical pathways consultations each month;
  • 71,000 more blood pressure check consultations each month;
  • and 25,800 more oral contraception consultations each month.

This increased monthly target for Pharmacy First consultations would come to a total of 3.84 million more consultations each year.

Pharmacies must currently meet a minimum number of Pharmacy First consultations each month, increasing from one per pharmacy in February and five in March and April to 30 in October.

The maximum number of Pharmacy First consultations each pharmacy can deliver is currently capped at 3,000 consultations per pharmacy per month until October 2024, when new caps will be introduced based on actual provision of the service.

The caps introduced in October will be designed to deliver three million consultations across the sector each quarter with any unused activity rolling forward to subsequent quarters of that financial year.

In total, funding from the £645m allocated to the sector for 2023-25 as part of the recovery plan is available to fund 12 million Pharmacy First consultations across the country per year.

In today's update, NHSE also suggested that ‘further funding’ would be available to in 2024/25 to ‘support the continued delivery of the delivery plan for recovering access to primary care’, including ‘funding to support the continued roll-out of Pharmacy First’.

Further detail of funding flows will follow as soon as possible, NHSE said.

The Pharmacist understands this continued funding refers to the £645m already allocated to the sector in the primary care recovery plan last year, which was to be delivered over two years.

Amid pressures on the sector, concerns have been raised about its capacity to deliver new services, including around staffing levels and suitability of premises.

And pharmacists have recently taken to social media to share the impact of Pharmacy First consultations on patient waiting times.

NHSE also said today that it would 'continue to monitor uptake by Distance Selling Pharmacies, which have an important role to play in providing wider access to patients via video consultations.'

NHSE director for primary care Dr Amanda Doyle recently suggested that the provision of pharmacy services is currently balanced ‘in a different way’ amid community pharmacy closures and a rise in DSPs, although she acknowledged that bricks and mortar pharmacies were still important to deliver accessible clinical services for patients.

In today's update, NHSE also said it was ‘on track’ with public consultations and legislative changes to deliver ‘greater flexibility to release pharmacists’ time for patient-facing services’.

Following a public consultation, the government announced last month that pharmacy technicians will be enabled to supply medicines under patient group directions (PGDs), subject to parliamentary approval.

And legislative change on supervision has been urged following a consultation and a cross-sector consensus on the issue.

Commenting on the update shared by NHSE today, James Davies, England director for the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) told The Pharmacist: 'Pharmacists will be central to the ambition to enhance patient access to primary care and this was underlined by the really positive launch of Pharmacy First.'

But he said that as pharmacy teams are asked to do more, 'this must be backed by sustainable funding, digital infrastructure, and investment in the workforce.'