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The supply of emergency contraception through the NHS pharmacy contraception service is “positively impacting health inequalities”, a senior NHS England figure has said.
Speaking at the Pharmacy Show, held in Birmingham on 11 October 2026, Kirsty Armstrong, senior policy lead for clinical strategy for pharmacy at NHS England, told delegates that the addition of emergency contraception to the NHS pharmacy contraception service in October 2025 has “been phenomenal”.
“What we can see when we look at the postcodes for pharmacies delivering the service, we’ve got one of those inverse relationships between the lower IMD [index of multiple deprivation] deciles and the supply of emergency contraception,” she said.
Armstrong added: “[This] is one of the key objectives of the service… to try to make this as accessible as possible.”
Community pharmacies have been able to supply emergency contraception through the pharmacy contraception service since October 2025.
The pharmacy contraception service first launched in April 2023, enabling pharmacies to issue repeat supplies of oral hormonal contraception on the NHS to patients who had already been prescribed the pill.
It was then expanded in December 2023 to allow pharmacies to initiate the contraceptive pill under a patient group direction.
Armstrong noted that as of June 2026, community pharmacies had carried out 2.3 million total consultations, including 238,000 initiations of contraception and 1.5 million ongoing supplies.
Pharmacies have also carried out 530,000 emergency contraception consultations since it was included in the pharmacy contraception service.
With the roll out of the independent prescribing service in community pharmacy, Armstrong highlighted that the contraception service will expand, adding that “going forward you’ll be able to offer vaginal rings, patches, and you’ll be able to offer depot injections where you’ve got agreement with your local ICBs [integrated care boards] from an administration point of view”.
She explained that pharmacists will also be able to offer “non-contraceptive medicines that are being used as contraception”, such as Dianette.
However, this part of the service will only be available to independent prescribing pharmacists that have been onboarded with their ICB and have a cost centre allocated to them, Armstrong said. NHS cost centres are issued to recharge the prescription costs to the appropriate prescribing budget.
As part of the ‘Community pharmacy contractual framework’ (CPCF) for 2026/2027, Community Pharmacy England and the government announced in May 2026 that independent prescribing will be introduced into the CPCF as an extension of Pharmacy First and the pharmacy contraception service from autumn 2026.
Pharmacies in Scotland and Wales can also provide emergency contraception on the NHS, which is available to purchase over the counter from pharmacies. On 1 July 2026, the College of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare called for the drug to be reclassified as a general sales list item, which would allow it to be sold directly from shops and retailers.
