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Testing of a prototype single national formulary (SNF) will begin by June 2026, NHS England has announced.
Speaking at the Clinical Pharmacy Congress 2026, held in London on 8 May 2026, Rebecca Burgoyne, senior medicines policy manager at NHS England, said the prototype would begin a test phase alongside the development of draft national guidance for local formulary standardisation.
From July 2026, decisions in therapeutic areas would start to be released, using a “test and learn” approach with early adopter sites, she added.
In its ‘Fit for the future: ten-year health plan for England‘, published on 3 July 2025, the government promised a SNF for medicines within the next two years.
The plan described current localised process for getting new medicines to patients as “bureaucratic and creates a postcode lottery”.
Currently, formularies are locally maintained documents that list medicines deemed suitable for prescribing within the local area. These are drawn up by locally constituted groups of clinicians from both secondary and primary care, with occasional commissioner or patient input.
Burgoyne said that the SNF “will be enabled by strategic commissioners, as they focus on population health management, with a focus on value and outcome, not price”, adding that it will be delivered as a “digital product that is integrated in the clinical workload and prescribing systems”.
However, she emphasised that clinicians will “retain full clinical freedom to prescribe in the best interest of their patients”, while “shared decision-making between clinician and patient remains central to how the SNF should be applied in practice”.
In addition, Burgoyne noted that final national guidance for the SNF is expected in December 2026, with the SNF digital tool to launch in July 2027 in a select range of therapeutic areas. By 2030, the tool will have expanded to other areas, including medical technology, she added.
“So, within two years, we will deliver a product to include medicine in a select range of therapeutic areas, and the SNF will then evolve over the following three years to cover more medicines for your patients,” she said.
Also speaking at the session, Richard Cattell, deputy chief pharmaceutical officer for England, said that “every NHS patient in England deserves access to the right medicine at the right time, wherever they live”, but acknowledged that at the moment, “we haven’t got that right”.
The SNF is expected to remove significant barriers in medicines’ use and “what patients tell us is a postcode lottery”, he said, adding that success will be “measured by patients’ access to medicine in a timely way”.
