‘Not your money’: CPE admits £645m Pharmacy First cash ‘unlikely to be spent’
The pharmacy negotiator has admitted that “it is a challenge” to convince the government to spend all £645 million of the Pharmacy First funding, while pleas for threshold changes are like “pushing against a closed door”.
Community Pharmacy England (CPE) has revealed that NHS England (NHSE) is “quite clear” on its multimillion-pound Pharmacy First investment – “if you earn it, you get it, but it's not your money”.
At the annual Avicenna conference in London on Sunday (September 8), CPE’s NHS services director Alastair Buxton told delegates that the two-year sector funding of “up to” £645 million for the new service announced last May is far from promised.
“NHSE is quite clear: ‘This is money that we will spend as we see fit. If you earn it, you get it, but it's not your money’ – which is not the way we see it, we see it as a budget that should be spent on community pharmacy in whatever way,” Buxton said.
“In terms of what happens to the [£645m investment], I think we all recognise that the totality of that is unlikely to be spent,” he added.
Buxton said that CPE is “continuing to push in the current round of negotiations” for any leftover money from the £645m to be used for “writing off fee over-deliveries”, as some £112m in Pharmacy First funding was used in November.
“It is a challenge to get [commissioners] to commit to spend more, but we will continue to push that”.
“Pushing against a closed door”
Buxton also said that CPE agreed that Pharmacy First consultation thresholds – the minimum number of consultations needed to be completed by pharmacies to qualify for a monthly payment – are “not realistic”.
“The biggest issue that concerns all of you at the moment, and concerns us the most as well, is the thresholds,” he told delegates.
He added that while CPE had convinced the Department of Health and Social Care (DH) and NHSE to drop the August threshold from 20 to 15, the negotiator has not “yet been able to persuade them to make any more changes” as the threshold climbed to 20 this month and rises to 30 next month.
He said that CPE will “continue to push for that”, adding that “at the moment, we seem to be pushing against a bit of a closed door – but we're not giving up on that".
"A broken NHS"
A DH spokesperson today (September 10) told C+D that “this government inherited a broken NHS and pharmacies have been neglected for years”.
“Pharmacies are key to our plans to make healthcare fit for the future as we shift the focus of the NHS out of hospitals and into the community,” they said.
“We will make better use of pharmacists’ skills, including rolling out independent prescribing to improve access to care,” they added.
Read more: ‘Pull your socks up!’ CPE slams new ‘one-off’ Pharmacy First media campaign
They said that the minimum activity requirement will continue to increase to incentivise delivery of Pharmacy First.
And NHSE told C+D that “Pharmacy First’s take-up has been highly successful, with more than nine in ten pharmacies in England already signed up to deliver convenient access to health help and treatments for patients".
The service “marks a significant expansion in the service offer from pharmacies with 592,000 consultations delivered in the first four months,” it said, adding that it is currently reviewing trajectories.
Just £180m for pharmacy?
The comments come after the National Pharmacy Association (NPA) revealed in June that its analysis showed that “at the current rate, only £180m is expected to be delivered to pharmacies in England out of the £645m that the government has allocated” by the end of March 2025.
“That means, as it stands, community pharmacies are set to lose £465m without a commitment from the future government” to deliver this money to the frontline, it added.
And last month, NHS Business Services Authority (NHS BSA) data revealed that some £2,000 in upfront Pharmacy First funding is set to be recovered from 555 contractors – totalling £1.1m.
Meanwhile, CPE also last month warned that “almost 65% of pharmacy premises report they are losing money”.
