How will Community Pharmacy funding be distributed?

The £2.592bn contract sum is the total amount of national funding that the government intends to deliver to community pharmacies in England throughout the financial year.

This funding is distributed to pharmacies through a combination of fees and retained margin.

What can I do right now to prepare for changes to the pharmacy contract in England  ?

General advice:

• Read the NPA’s initial reaction to the pharmacy contract
• In light of the fact that there will be no more new money for dispensing volume, think again about how you can either cut costs or work smarter and efficiently in your business and consider the skill mix in your pharmacy.  There are lots of practical tips in the Spring edition of InPharmacy magazine
• Start thinking about your engagement with Primary Care Networks, liaising with your LPC.  Take a look at this blog from some intrepid NPA members already beginning their own PCN journey and follow them over the months ahead to learn from their progress
• Build your local connectivity by speaking to your LPC Independent Representative and team and work to build even more positive relationships with your key GP surgery teams
• Review the new Quality Payment criteria for the second half of the financial year. Start thinking about how you can deliver them
• The new national NHS Advanced Service – Community Pharmacist Consultation Service (CPCS), will go live from 29th October 2019. The NPA strongly encourages you to engage with, register, and deliver the CPCS when it goes live. Watch this short message from NPA Board Member Nick Kaye on why he has registered for the service:

Useful Webinars:

• Watch PSNC’s webinar on the five-year CPCF and register for one of PSNC’s contract roadshow events
• Watch NPA’s webinar on the NHS Community Pharmacist Consultation Service: a golden opportunity for your pharmacy? FAQs can be downloaded here
• Watch our series of webinar on Contract and Funding here

Professional Development courses to take:

• Improve on the clinical knowledge you will need to deliver the range of services now in the NHS service development pipeline, and record this as CPD. Consider refreshing knowledge on minor illnesses and Hep C testing.  You can access the NPA’s CPD hub here
• Make sure you are, or are on track to become a Healthy Living Pharmacy.  It will be a requirement by the Terms of Service to have attained HLP Level 1 status by April 2020. Access this course here
• Members are also able to enter ‘CPCS’ into the search bar to find all related content

Have your say:

• Let us know your thoughts on plans to change pharmacy reimbursement systems. The current DHSC consultation seeks to deliver a fairer share of margin, but some changes may have unintended consequences. Have your say at independentsvoice@npa.co.uk

CPCF calendars:

To assist our members meet the various associated deadlines, the NPA has launched the following calendars:

• CPCF calendar overview – a Microsoft Excel document with a full list of calendar dates including deadlines, audit start/end dates and relevant dates for the Pharmacy Quality Scheme (PQS) and the Community Pharmacy Consultation Service (CPCS)
• CPCF calendar checklist – a checklist document of calendar dates in Microsoft Word format which facilitates allocation of tasks to appropriate members of the pharmacy team and logging of completion dates
• CPCF working calendar – with spaces for your own use to set deadlines for your pharmacy team – a Microsoft Excel document with pre-populated CPCF dates and also containing blank dates in the month-by-month tabs to allow you to input dates and actions specific to your pharmacy/organisation; this is designed to be used in conjunction with the above two calendars

CPCF – common acronyms

A number of acronyms occur within the various elements of the CPCF. They can potentially be difficult to understand and may cause confusion. To support community pharmacy teams, a CPCF resource has been produced to list the common acronyms found in CPCF – please note that this is not an exhaustive list