Sometime in early 2026, NHS England will publish a workforce plan, intended to further the implementation of its ten-year health plan, which was published in July 2025.
The ten-year plan included three “fundamental shifts”: moving care into the community via neighbourhood health services; switching focus from sickness to prevention; and digitalising the NHS.
These are all big asks. Such shifts are also likely to require changes to the shape of the healthcare workforce in England. In its call for evidence in developing the workforce plan, NHS England stated that rather than asking how many staff would be needed to make these shifts happen, the question should be: “What workforce do we need, what should they do, where should they be deployed, and what skills do they need to deliver better care for patients and citizens?”
To that could be added: “How can we ensure that pharmacists, and other healthcare professionals, have those skills?” This was discussed by attendees at a roundtable meeting hosted by The Pharmaceutical Journal in September 2025, which focused on implementation of the ten-year health plan.
Attendees at this event agreed that investment in the pharmacy workforce and proper embedding of pharmacist prescribers in NHS services will be vital if the ten-year plan is to be a success from a pharmacy perspective.
This year, The PJ investigated whether pharmacists are receiving the training they need to develop professionally. The answer, sadly, is that often they are not.
In September 2025, The PJ reported that more than one-quarter of NHS trusts and boards do not provide protected learning time in job plans for hospital pharmacists, and only 23% of trusts and boards use job plans for pharmacists at all.
This was described as “disappointing” and “unsurprising”.
It’s hard to tell, particularly in the recent turbulent political climate, how the various NHS plans mesh together
It also probably won’t come as a huge surprise to know that this isn’t anything new. In 2020, The PJ’s salary survey revealed that around half of pharmacist respondents said they are never given protected learning time.
In 2020, the issue was most pronounced in community pharmacy, at roughly the average 50% mark for hospital pharmacists and much less common for pharmacists working in primary care.
Fast forward to 2025 and our latest salary survey revealed that just over one-quarter (27%) of pharmacists said they had accessed protected learning time over the past year. Plus ça change.
However, it is not just the lack of training that is hampering pharmacists’ ability to do their jobs to the best of their ability. The 2025 salary survey also found that a lack of pharmacy staff was the biggest barrier (at 59% of respondents) to pharmacists being able to do their jobs properly.
In terms of hard numbers, the ‘NHS England long-term workforce plan’, published in 2023, promised to increase training places for pharmacists by nearly 50% from 2023 figures to around 5,000 places by 2031/2032. Several new pharmacy schools have since appeared, so this number may be achieved, but it is hard to tell, particularly in the recent turbulent political climate, how the various NHS plans mesh together.
If numbers in the 2023 workforce plan are in train, then perhaps the forthcoming workforce plan will indeed focus on the skills that pharmacists will need to improve patient care.
From the summer of 2026, all newly-qualified pharmacists will join the register as independent prescribers, and a national independent prescribing pharmacy service is due to be commissioned — all the more reason why protected time to complete mandatory CPD and the space to develop as clinicians must feature in the ten-year workforce plan.
There’s no question that the whole of the NHS is under huge pressure and the community pharmacy sector has rarely, if ever, felt so beleaguered.
It is hoped that the ten-year workforce plan, when it appears, will recognise both how overwhelmed many pharmacists currently feel, and the importance of developing pharmacists who have the skills to deliver the best possible care for patients. PJ
Further reading: The Pharmaceutical Journal‘s workforce campaign
Earlier in 2025, The PJ launched a dedicated campaign aimed at championing solutions for the pharmacy workforce crisis.
Since then, The PJ has explored challenges, championed innovative solutions and advocated for policy changes and the investment needed to fill workforce gaps, improve wellbeing and create a more robust, resilient and rewarding profession for the future.
You can read more and explore our content on the workforce campaign here.
