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Independent pharmacist prescribers should have protected time away from their day-to-day duties —funded by the local integrated care board (ICB) — to build local relationships, according to an independent report into community pharmacy prescribing in England.
In a report evaluating the Independent Prescribing in Community Pharmacy Pathfinder Programme, published on 8 January 2025, researchers from the University of Manchester recommended that community pharmacies will need access to diagnostics — such as phlebotomy — and read/write access to GP records to deliver independent prescribing (IP) services.
The report also revealed that pharmacists participating in the evaluation “were broadly positive about the implementation of IP in community pharmacy” and reported “increased job satisfaction, linked to the opportunity to apply their clinical skills”.
“Participants noted that IP should not be seen as an isolated service, as IP is not just about prescribing but providing holistic patient care, which requires broader clinical consideration and collaboration with general practice,” it said.
In addition, the report stressed the importance of clinical supervision for independent prescriber pharmacists — which was mostly conducted by local GPs during the pathfinder project — and recommended that ICBs should facilitate access to supervision and support for independent prescribing pharmacists.
NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) should “develop a national strategy for robust infrastructure, essential training and ongoing clinical supervision and support”, it added.
The proposed national strategy would include “access/infrastructure to diagnostics, such as phlebotomy, recognising it as a key element of future clinical services”, as well as “access to patient records that enable IP pharmacists to not only view patients’ medical histories for safe prescribing, but to directly communicate with GP practices”.
The findings of an analysis conducted by The Pharmaceutical Journal in November 2025 suggested that local GP surgeries were blocking pharmacies from adding Pharmacy First consultations to patient records 40% of the time, despite this being required by the GP contract.
The University of Manchester report into community pharmacist prescribing urged that NHS England and the DHSC should also “acknowledge the significant scale of this paradigm shift and cultural change and commitment to a substantial, sustained investment in workforce development and behavioural change initiatives across both community pharmacy and its partners in neighbourhood health systems”.
It said that ICBs should continue to fund dedicated integration leads, such as regional senior integration pharmacy leads and community pharmacy clinical leads, while local leaders should represent community pharmacy at the neighbourhood level.
ICBs have recently been instructed to reduce their running costs by 50%, although it is as yet unclear what this will mean for pharmacy roles.
Commenting on the report, Leyla Hannbeck, chief executive of the Association of Independent Multiple Pharmacies (AIMp), said: “Independent prescribing is something that our sector has been aspiring to and we have maintained that there must be additional monies for this and it must be funded from extrinsic sources outside of the global sum. The rates must also reflect the work involved and the time this will take.
“However, the reality points increasingly to the fact that the timing around this initiative is challenging and it adds considerable bureaucracy at a time when pharmacies are significantly struggling to survive.”
The government and the pharmacy negotiator Community Pharmacy England are expected to begin discussing a nationally commissioned prescribing service from April 2026.
The report found that sessional payments for prescribing consultations “was viewed as moving in the right direction, as it was focused on outcomes”.
“However, our interviewees highlighted the need for commissioning strategies that generate predictable patient volumes to ensure a financially viable service,” it added.
The report stressed the importance of skills mix and utilising supervision changes to enable prescribers to deliver IP services.
It also said employers should provide “appropriate corporate or group indemnity that explicitly covers the full scope of IP services delivered by their employees”, while NHS England and the DHSC should “set a clear and standardised understanding of indemnity and the scope and risks involved in delivering IP in community pharmacy”.
Responding to the report, a spokesperson for NHS England said: “NHS England commissioned this evaluation to ensure that integrated care boards had the direction they needed to rollout independent prescribing in their communities, and these findings have been shared with them.
“We will also use these findings to help us develop future clinical services within pharmacy, and as we deliver on the ten-year health plan, which aims to improve patient access to services in the community, and pharmacies will have an integral role in that work.“
Tase Oputu, chair of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society English Pharmacy Board, said: “Making the most of this opportunity depends on commissioning new pharmacist prescribing services, investing in training capacity, and funding protected time for professional development and system leadership.
“Amid significant cuts to ICBs, continued pharmacy clinical leadership across the system will be essential to making independent prescribing a success.”
