Paul Stuart
Only a few community pharmacies in England have been involved in the planning of new neighbourhood health services, Janet Morrison, chief executive of Community Pharmacy England (CPE), has said.
Speaking to attendees at a CPE-run event, held at the Labour Party conference fringe in Liverpool on 28 September 2026, Morrison said the NHS ten-year plan, which set out the intention to create neighbourhood health centres, highlighted that community pharmacy should be integral to neighbourhood care.
“But the reality is that so far — and we work very closely with our partners locally to see what’s happening — there’s actually very little evidence that we are built into the plans that have started up on neighbourhoods,” she said.
Morrison noted that she knew of only “two or three” cases where pharmacy had been involved, adding that these were made possible by small amounts of funding to enable community pharmacy to be involved in the discussions and planning.
“That makes a difference… because neighbourhood health, if it’s meaningfully delivered, is delivered through existing pathways, through existing assets and through existing expertise,” Morrison continued.
“[Community pharmacies] do know a lot because of those close relationships with patients and the public. So why aren’t we using those skills more readily?”
Primary care needed “a better understanding of how we can work in multidisciplinary teams” and must “be commissioned for collaboration, not competition”, she added.
Morrison also explained that she was “really concerned” that there had been “very little conversation” around investment in infrastructure and innovation.
“Our clinical services right now are … not all IT enabled to the right standards. But we need the interoperability,” she said.
At the Labour Party conference event, Morrison also spoke about the planned conversations between CPE and the government over reform to the pharmacy contract.
“That will be a challenging agenda, but we are looking at short-term issues that might be able to ease and improve operations now, but we hope to be able to build into some bigger picture questions,” she said.
The negotiator also hinted at a possible shift to a multi-year agreement with the government around the community pharmacy contract.
Morrison acknowledged that the sector had “got badly burnt in the past with a five year deal, which was 0% [increase] each year for every year. And that was despite inflation and activity and all of that…. but it’s quite hard to see how you deliver on a long-term vision [with] year by year commissioning of services”.
“That’s true nationally, but it’s also true locally. Something would have to shift… about that,” Morrison said.
Also speaking at the panel, which was hosted by CPE and thinktank Re:State, pharmacy minister Dame Diana Johnson told delegates: “We want to have a proper discussion about what reform means, in terms of [our] neighbourhood healthcare offer and [how] pharmacists fit into that.”
Johnson also suggested that the NHS workforce plan, which is being developed to support the NHS ten-year plan, was due “shortly”.
