Following the Launch of Pharmacy First in England last year and aligning with similar projects in the devolved nations the 2024 collaborative project between Pfizer Ltd, The National Pharmacy Association and Gen X Media (trading as Pharmacy in Practice), focused on developing a range of training and educational materials about the provision of treatments and vaccination services to patients, to optimise best practice within community pharmacy and bring benefits to patients and pharmacy consumers, in accordance with national guidelines.
The 2025 collaboration will see the National Pharmacy Association, Gen X Media (trading as Pharmacy in Practice) come together with The Company Chemists’ Association Ltd to expand the scope across the UK community pharmacy network, identifying innovative solutions to ease NHS pressures and building on the significant outcomes achieved from the 2024 project.
Benefits to patients
- Explore innovative solutions that provide easier access to services for patients and eases NHS pressures, building on our past achievements.
- Improve awareness of additional medicines/vaccines and clinical services via materials made available through their local community pharmacy.
- Improve choice of a range of treatments and clinical advice, including urgent care and vaccines through their community pharmacy.
Benefits to the NHS
- Materials being developed for community pharmacists will align with national guidance and commitments made in the NHS Long Term Plan that aims to support GP and hospital services to focus on their post-pandemic recovery plans in their efforts to tackle patient backlogs.
- Materials will promote the enhancement of best practice, with the aim of alleviating pressures on the health and care system and offering solutions to those health and care services that can more easily be delivered through community pharmacy.
Benefits to collaborative parties
- The collaboration highlights CCA’s unique position to provide enhanced support and robust advocacy, by leading the transformation of community pharmacy, ensuring sustainable and impactful healthcare solutions for their communities.
- Enhance the national profile and amplify awareness of PiP’s capability to develop groundbreaking solutions to the challenges facing the NHS.
- The NPA will continue to elevate the profile of community pharmacy and the crucial role it plays within the healthcare environment. The outcomes of this collaboration will further empower independent community pharmacies to achieve a promising clinical future, catering to the health needs of their local communities.
Benefits to Pfizer
- Increase our understanding of how we improve patient access to our medicines/vaccines through community pharmacy.
- Developing innovative educational and patient materials will enhance Pfizer's reputation, support community pharmacy to offer solutions, highlight areas of best practice and introduce innovative ways of working.
Workstream 1 - Evolving the workstreams of the 2024 collaboration
The first workstream will build on the priority frameworks of the 5 workstreams developed during 2024 to continue to support community pharmacy to expand and enhance the delivery of clinical services, treatments and healthcare advice, by:
- Planning to support upskilling independent prescribers and seek to replicate the Pharmacy First Plus Scotland model – using NHS England’s Early Adopter Programme with rolling out NHS vaccination programmes across the community pharmacy setting in East of England and expanding across 200 other sites in England to address health inequalities and social deprivation.
- Deliver an Early Adopter programme for IP Micro-Credentialling.
- Carry out a review of the Workforce development resources to align with Health ecosystem changes, and explore the expansion of the patient partnerships initiative with other patient groups following success of the 2024 UK Sepsis Trust patient partnership initiative and specifically for 2025 to explore with Meningitis Now through a new partnership approach.
Workstream 2 – Increasing urgent access to medicines and care through the network of community pharmacies across the UK
- Conduct an ‘Urgent Care’ thought-leadership review to establish what community pharmacy could feasibly deliver.
- Establish a short-life working group to extend Pharmacy First to include urgent care provisions and wider range of NHS vaccinations commissioned from more community pharmacies beyond the well-established flu and covid vaccination programmes.
- Improve relationships across Primary Care (GPs, Pharmacists, Nurses, Dentists, AHPs, etc) to explore ability to deliver an expanded Pharmacy First model, to include the potential for establishing a national community pharmacy smoking cessation service.
- Promote quality interventions to ensure consistency.
The collaboration will be looking at this entire project through the lens of assisting to address and trying to reduce health inequalities and enhance urgent access to care in areas of need.
All materials created within the collaborative project and their distribution are subject to Pfizer compliance review and approval (in line the ABPI Code) during the life of the project timeframe but are free for use of the Collaborative partners on completion and thereafter close of the project.
Planned start date: 18th August 2025.
Planned end date: 17th August 2026.