The government this week (March 31) revealed that a “targeted” pharmacy quality scheme (PQS) “will be reinstated with a value of £30 million from April 1”.
Announced as part of the long-awaited new community pharmacy contract for 2025/26, Community Pharmacy England (CPE) said that the PQS will be “smaller than usual”.
Read more: Funding breakdown: Write-offs, service payments and activity fees
This “[recognises] the tight funding envelope available”, the Department of Health and Social Care (DH) said, adding that although it had “seen the success of the PQS” across the previous five-year deal, “uplifting fees to start to stabilise services had to take priority”.
According to CPE, many elements of the PQS will be repeated from “those in previous schemes to support the ongoing embedding of these quality improvements into pharmacy practice”.
Read more: BREAKING: New 2025 CPCF funding deal - uplift revealed
“The scheme will continue to be an optional part of the [contract] and pharmacy owners that choose to participate will be able to claim an aspiration payment of 75% of the overall points value...in May for payment on July 1,” it added.
This would work out at around “£2,300 per pharmacy aspiring to undertake the whole scheme”, CPE said.
PQS criteria
The criteria of the 2025/26 PQS will focus on “key priority areas building on the previous success of the scheme” and will include:
- Gateway - being signed up and registered to deliver Pharmacy First clinical pathways and the pharmacy contraception service (PCS)
- Palliative and end of life care - pharmacies must develop or update an action plan and, if they stock the 16 relevant medicines, update their ‘directory of services’ profile to confirm this
- Respiratory - referral of patients aged five to 15 years who do not have a spacer and all patients using three or more short-acting bronchodilators without any corticosteroid inhaler in six months
- Pharmacy First - completion of a clinical audit and all registered professionals must have completed the Centre for Pharmacy Postgraduate Education (CPPE) sepsis training
- Emergency Contraception - all pharmacists and other registered pharmacy professionals intending to provide the service must complete CPPE emergency contraception training
- NMS depression training - all pharmacists must complete CPPE online training on consulting with people with mental health problems
- Enabled DBS checks - enhanced disclosure and barring service (DBS) checks undertaken for all registered pharmacy professionals within the last three years
“Reward” pharmacists
The PQS was first introduced in December 2016 and was designed “to reward community pharmacies for delivering quality criteria in...clinical effectiveness, patient safety and patient experience”, according to NHS England.
In 2023/24, the PQS was “reduced...compared to the scheme originally planned” and CPE said at the time that the decision to go ahead with a PQS “without an urgent injection of extra funding [was] in contradiction of [its] warnings to ministers”.
Read more: PSNC hits back as DH ploughs ahead with reduced PQS amid ‘imposed’ changes
However, it said in 2023 that it recognised “the importance of some elements of the PQS” and “the fact that the scheme continues to demonstrate pharmacy’s commitment to, and exceptional performance on, quality”.
Meanwhile, the new contract also saw fee uplifts for most pharmacy services and a 19p increase in the single activity free (SAF).
And the announcement revealed that the morning-after pill will become “available free of charge at pharmacies on the NHS for the first time ever”.
Check the C+D site for the latest coverage on this developing story
