“I haven’t been able to find a DPP – I’ve been looking, can you guys help?” That is the plea increasingly heard by private provider DPP Connect, the company has told C+D.
To qualify as an IP, a pharmacist must be supervised by a DPP during their IP course and have their competency signed off by one at the end of the course.
But since NHS England (NHSE) announced that all pharmacy trainees qualify as IPs from 2025/26, sector bodies have expressed their concerns about a shortage of DPPs.
Read more: DPP shortage: ‘Excess’ pharmacy trainee places ‘on the face of it’, says GPhC chief
DPP Connect standards and quality assurance director Ruhina Kassam told C+D the company is coming to the rescue of pharmacists who can’t get hold of a prescriber to complete their qualification.
For between £2000–£2400, the company matches individuals with a DPP from its pool of professionals who have “different scopes of practice [across] different geographical locations” and delivers “about £1000 worth of training to go with it as well”, Kassam said.
Read more: Proposals to make DPP ‘routine’ job responsibility are ‘troubling’, warns PDA
The service has come a long way since 2019, when Kassam started “informally matching people with DPPs”.
In the first two months of 2025, some 82 students were already booked onto the service – almost triple the total 30 students booked in 2024.
Queries to the company’s dedicated DPP hotline have also exploded, almost doubling from 145 in July to 236 January.
“Panic from pharmacists”
Why the sudden influx? DPP Connect strategic healthcare workforce development lead Mahmud Yusupov told C+D that there “is a bit of a panic from pharmacists”.
“They feel like they’re missing out,” he said.
Community pharmacists are often left without a DPP to help them upskill, Yusupov explained.
“Primary care pharmacists are more or less looked after… [the] majority of them are sorted because they work in the industry where a DPP is managing them and they’re working alongside,” he said.
Read more: DPP shortage: Crunch talks generate positive engagement, say RPS and NPA
“Usually” hospital pharmacists can also access a DPPS, he added.
“And then you have community pharmacists who don’t really have any access to DPPs – they don’t work alongside any other prescribers [and] their employer may not necessarily support them,” he said.
“The majority of the pharmacists who come to us are community pharmacists, and the usual theme is that they’re very, very desperate to get somebody,” Yusupov added.
“They’ve tried other methods…they’ve messaged everyone in their local GP surgeries”, but often they will be turned down, he said.
Read more: Trainee IP pharmacists asked to fork out up to £3k to source own DPP
“Usually, the GPs will have had students previously, but they say: ‘We’ve already helped enough pharmacists as goodwill, for free, but we can’t keep doing it forever’,” he said.
“I need to spend time with the patient…there is no backfill to support me, financially it doesn’t work out,” are other common replies.
“Now, the doors are kind of closing,” he said.
“Hassle and hard work”
Kassam told C+D that DPP Connect works to avoid frustration on the DPP’s end.
“We’ve created this of model of training the pharmacist before they go into the practices – we give them system training, we give them clinical training, we show them how to write and do consultations,” she said.
“[Then] when they go into that practice, that DPP doesn’t feel like they’re wasting their time,” she added.
Read more: Trainee prescribers: GPhC to allow ‘virtual supervision’ by DPPs
“And we found that this kind of model has really made the DPPs want to help support those students, rather than thinking ‘Oh no, it’s just going to be like hassle and hard work’,” she said.
Kassam said that DPP connect is also “fussy with [its] DPPs, because we want our students to have the best learning experience they can have”.
“We really want to make a transformative impact about helping to support with this DPP shortage and make sure that we’ve got good quality DPPs out there,” she added.
DPP latest
In September, General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) chief executive Duncan Rudkin told Avicenna conference delegates that the regulator was “working with NHSE and others to make sure that those DPPs are there to provide the supervision” for incoming pharmacy students.
In May, the Company Chemists’ Association (CCA) demanded that NHSE provide “a list of all organisations” that have spare DPPs as it voiced “grave concerns” that “pharmacies will be unable to secure” them.
Read more: Multiples will only offer 300 trainee placements for 2025/26
And in June, C+D revealed that large multiples will be the lead employer on only 277 of the 4,102 placements available for the 2025/26 cohort of pharmacy trainees.
Meanwhile in February, the Pharmacists’ Defence Association (PDA) warned against apparent proposals to make DPP supervision “a routine responsibility” and part of a pharmacist’s “normal job without considering job evaluation or pay”.
At the time, it deemed suggestions of baking the role into job descriptions as “troubling”.
