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The government is putting in place legislation to allow hub-and-spoke dispensing between different legal entities in 2025, pharmacy minister Stephen Kinnock has said.
On 23 December 2024, Kinnock responded to a question from Harriett Baldwin, shadow minister for business and trade, who asked whether the government “plans to bring forward hub-and-spoke dispensing legislation for pharmacies in 2025”.
Kinnock said: “The government is working towards introducing legislation to enable hub-and-spoke dispensing between different legal entities in 2025.
“This change will be enabled via amendments to both primary and secondary legislation and is subject to the usual parliamentary processes.”
Community Pharmacy England (CPE) said in September 2024 that it had been told that changes to hub-and-spoke legislation would not be implemented in January 2025, as originally planned.
The delay was attributed to the general election in July 2024, when progress on the amendments was paused, CPE said, adding that time was then taken to brief new ministers across all policy areas, including hub-and-spoke dispensing between different pharmacy owners.
Hub-and-spoke dispensing is currently only allowed between pharmacy locations belonging to the same owner or legal entity — for example, between branches of the same pharmacy company.
Amendments to legislation to allow hub-and-spoke dispensing between different legal entities have been in the works since May 2024, following a consultation held between March and June 2022.
In a report on the consultation outcome, published in May 2024, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said the amended legislation allowing hub-and-spoke dispensing across different legal entities would level the playing field in community pharmacy, “enabling spokes to provide more patient-facing services, relieving pressure on the wider NHS”.
The proposed changes to the legislation would allow for two cross-entity hub-and-spoke models. In both models, the patient presents their prescription to a spoke pharmacy, and the prescription is assembled at a hub pharmacy.
In model one, the assembled medicine would be sent back from the hub to the spoke for the patient to collect. In model two, the patient would receive their prescription from the hub.
Claire Anderson, president of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, told The Pharmaceutical Journal on 3 January 2025: “We welcome clarity on plans to better enable community pharmacies to make use of hub-and-spoke dispensing.
“While this model could improve efficiency, it must prioritise patient safety and transparency. Patients must know where their medicines are supplied from and feel confident that data are protected.”
Gareth Jones, director of corporate affairs at the National Pharmacy Association, commented: “We need ministers to concentrate all their energies on getting a decent financial settlement to pharmacies as soon as possible before they embark on structural changes to the sector. Hub-and-spoke models may work for some pharmacies, but it’s more important that we secure the network as a whole and halt the devastating roll call of closures in the short run.
“Above all, we need to be very careful not to write community pharmacies out of the equation by careless application of a direct-to-patients model of dispensing. The benefits of hub-and-spoke, in terms of releasing pharmacists’ time for patient care, are purely theoretical until there is a guaranteed pipeline of NHS investment in clinical services, to make the business case stack up for the spoke pharmacies.
“A new and significantly improved community pharmacy funding settlement would be needed to make any sense of hub-and-spoke in the medium term.”
- This article was amended on 7 January 2025 to include additional comment
