By Chief Executive Janet Morrison
Late last month, the Community Pharmacy England Committee met to continue preparations for the upcoming CPCF negotiations and review long-term strategic priorities. We also welcomed new Committee members and were hugely grateful to all business owners who contributed evidence to us through recent polls and events.
Key discussion areas included political insights and emerging thinking on the 10 Year Health Plan, negotiation scenario planning, how independent prescribing could be embedded into community pharmacy, ways to improve medicines margin and further options to address the funding gap.
Engaging with Government and addressing our sector’s funding challenges
The Committee received feedback from our recent meetings with Minister for Care Stephen Kinnock. Although sobering discussions, these showed that the Minister understood both the implications of the funding gap and the fragility of the network, as well as the case for investment in clinical services. It’s clear that the gears for change – the shift from hospital to community, and the development of the neighbourhood health service – will take time to deliver benefits for the sector. And given the fiscal environment, the Minister has been clear that constraints on government spending mean there is insufficient funding available across the board for the NHS, including community pharmacy, with some hard choices ahead.
The need for sustainability remains urgent, with untold risk to the safety of medicines supply and the healthcare support that pharmacies provide and the communities that rely upon them if the current pressures persist. The need for stabilisation was further underlined by the Chancellor’s Budget statement, with the uplift in the national living wage continuing to increase pressure on operational costs in the network.
With sweeping changes across the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England nationally, and ICBs and local systems across the country, Community Pharmacy England continues to advocate for the value of community pharmacy within the wider health system – emphasising our role as a first port of call for health in every community, reducing pressure on other frontline NHS services, and delivering wider economic gains by enabling people to stay working and active.
This shared mission was central to our recent national LPC Conference, where we also reviewed the changing landscape, the options for independent prescribing, the priorities for negotiations, and the implications of the 10 Year Health Plan. At Community Pharmacy England, we remain hopeful that there could still be opportunities, as the 10 Year Health Plan’s workstreams evolve, for further investment in key services that community pharmacy could deliver, supporting prevention and long-term conditions. The value of pharmacy is clear; we now need political commitment to safeguard the future of the network.
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