Money to develop IT systems to support the roll-out of Pharmacy First was 'not well spent', pharmacist and MP Sadik Al-Hassan has suggested.

The Labour MP for North Somerset was speaking at a roundtable focusing on community pharmacy technology in parliament yesterday when he was asked by The Pharmacist for his views on the IT systems in place for Pharmacy First and whether the funding for this had been used appropriately.

He responded: 'I don't feel that money was well spent. I think we should have a IT system that integrates with the rest of it.'

And he later added: 'For me, I think Pharmacy First could have been done a lot better if there was more input from pharmacy on its design.'

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The £645m funding announced for Pharmacy First included an allocation to develop ‘interoperable’ patient record systems between community pharmacy and general practice.

But the GP side of the system was not ready for when it launched last year.

And CPE said in March that a ‘backlog of unresolved issues’ with Pharmacy First IT systems had an ‘unacceptable impact’ on pharmacy teams and caused concerns about the impact on patients.

It took months for all pharmacies to have access to GP Connect Update Record, which allows them send Pharmacy First consultation notes to GP surgeries in a structured format, where they can be added automatically or with 'one-click' to the patient's GP record.

And some IT suppliers are now testing pharmacy access to GP records to support Pharmacy First consultations.

Also speaking at the PharmaTech event yesterday, National Pharmacy Association chair Nick Kay said the sector 'can be absolutely enabled by technology as a complete system player'.

But he added: 'It has to be easy for pharmacy to use [and] it needs to integrate.'

Santosh Sahu, chief executive of Charac, which sponsored the event, suggested that allowing smaller start-up companies as well as established providers to offer solutions for the NHS could improve efficiency in the commissioning of IT systems.

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'I'm up for the NHS to regulate, because patient safety is paramount,' he said.

And he suggested that private funding could be raised to invest in health technology, as had been done for financial technology (fintech).

'We did a lot of innovation from the UK in fintech. We can do that in health tech, as long as the NHS doesn't spend taxpayers money with IT consultancy companies,' Mr Sahu said.

A spokesperson for IT supplier Positive Solutions also commented on the issue, telling The Pharmacist that 'the money allocated to develop Pharmacy First was significantly below the actual costs incurred by the suppliers involved and relied on said suppliers to effectively self-fund large parts of the work involved.'

They also said the funding 'compares extremely poorly to equivalent funding for GP system IT developments – a disparity that is unnecessarily stifling the ability for NHS initiated development work in community pharmacy to keep apace of other primary care IT systems.'

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And they stressed that the systems had been developed quickly in response to 'political pressure'.

'The commissioning of IT in the sector requires a complete overhaul and is simply not fit for purpose and hasn’t been for a long time,' they added.