MAG / The Pharmaceutical Journal
Community pharmacy needs to be embedded in the development of neighbourhood health teams to enable effective delivery of the reforms set out in the government’s ten-year health plan, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) has told a committee of MPs.
Speaking at an evidence session on the forthcoming ten-year workforce plan, held by the House of Commons Health and Social Care Select Committee on 26 November 2025, Amandeep Doll, director for England at the RPS, said that early evidence from 43 pilot neighbourhood health service sites showed variation in how well pharmacy was included.
“We know that there are areas where community pharmacy is quite embedded into those neighbourhood health teams, looking at how they’re delivering care closer to home, but it’s inconsistent,” she said.
Doll added that pharmacy needed to be involved in neighbourhood health teams “from the outset”.
“We need community pharmacy alongside other healthcare providers, social care and voluntary sector people to be part of those initial discussions.”
To do this, Doll explained that comprehensive workforce and health data would be crucial to determining how pharmacists could be deployed within neighbourhood teams.
“We need informed population health data to help establish what the local population needs are, as well as really comprehensive workforce data to identify where those gaps are,” she said.
The government published a call for evidence on its proposed workforce plan in September 2025, with the consultation closing in November 2025. No date for publication of the plan has been announced.
Doll also suggested that changes to supervision legislation would help ensure that community pharmacies had the skill mix needed to support neighbourhood care.
Draft legislation, published in July 2025, included proposals to allow pharmacists to authorise pharmacy technicians to carry out — or supervise others carrying out — the preparation, assembly, dispensing, sale and supply of medicines. It also permitted any member of the pharmacy team to hand out checked and bagged prescriptions in the absence of a pharmacist.
“As a community pharmacist, you have to be in the building to be able to authorise medicines to be supplied, but allowing trained pharmacy technicians to hand out prescriptions while pharmacists undertook clinical work would improve flexibility and reduce bottlenecks,” she said.
However, she added: “It would cost more because it would mean putting funding into pharmacy technician skills and ensuring that actually there’s a good skill mix.”
Emphasising the need to make pharmacy roles more professionally fulfilling, Doll added that it was important to ensure pharmacists are utilised, “therefore they have better job satisfaction and then want to stay within the profession”.
Doll also spoke about the importance of meaningful investment in protected learning time so pharmacists and technicians could develop advanced clinical skills and deliver more patient-facing services.
“We need to actually upskill some of the current practising pharmacists to become prescribers… and give them the support to develop in that clinical area.”
She went on to warn that cuts to integrated care board (ICB) budgets risked undermining medicines optimisation expertise.
“There is a real risk with the 50% cuts to ICBs that medicines optimisation is considered as an administrative role, and we’re going to lose that skill set”, she said.
“Medicine is the biggest intervention to patient care, and if we lose that expertise, it’s not going to be strategically managed.”
