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Community pharmacy offers a route to dramatically increase capacity in primary care. This is the key message contained in the Company Chemists’ Association’s 2025 Prospectus, which is being launched today (September 11) at the CCA’s inaugural conference in London.

By expanding the Pharmacy First service, broadening community pharmacy’s role in delivering preventative services and building on the sector’s role in managing long-term conditions, primary care capacity and patient outcomes could be demonstrably improved, the Association says.

The changes set out in the 2025 Prospectus could free up 51 million GP appointments each year, says the CCA. This would be through:

• Expanding Pharmacy First – moving to a ‘walk-in’ service, expanding the range of conditions the service covers and, in time, moving to a prescribing service as pledged in the Labour Party’s manifesto. Modelling suggests Pharmacy First can create capacity for at least 17.7 million routine primary care consultations every year, the CCA says
• Empowering pharmacists to initiate treatment for high blood pressure, building on the success of the NHS Community Pharmacy Blood Pressure Check Service, before moving towards screening and initiating treatment for most routine long-term conditions. Treatment initiation, follow-up consultations and subsequent yearly reviews would provide at least 4.5 million primary care consultations every year, according to the CCA
• Commissioning all NHS vaccination programmes from community pharmacy so that patients can receive a whole range of vaccines at their local pharmacy including flu, Covid, HPV, shingles and pneumococcal
• Commissioning a wrap-around NHS weight loss service and a ‘walk-in’ smoking cessation service. Weight loss services will likely require three initiation/medicine review and adjustment consultations, and three to six follow-ups. Commissioning this within community pharmacy would create 12.75 million consultations annually. A walk-in pharmacy smoking cessation service would help around a quarter of a million people quit smoking every year. With each patient receiving five consultations, this represents 1.3 million consultations each year
• Allowing pharmacists greater flexibilities to substitute medicines during shortages, making changes to medicines to support adherence, or changing medicines to align with prescribing guidelines, or indeed deprescribing, where necessary.

“All of our recommendations are grounded in careful analysis, based on building on the existing foundations, and recognising the sector’s potential in addressing a whole range of pressing healthcare challenges,” the CCA says.

By establishing community pharmacy as an integrated, first-line provider of routine primary care, GP capacity can be focused on delivering more complex primary care, it continues. This “structural reimagining” will mean primary care has the capacity and accessibility needed for the Government’s 10 Year Health Plan for the NHS.

Significantly increasing primary care capacity through community pharmacy will require several enablers, the CCA says, including:

• Funding to address historic deficits, and investment in the sector to commission additional workload and new services, in turn giving pharmacy businesses the confidence to invest
• Encourage businesses to invest in their premises to provide bigger pharmacies and more consultation rooms, and by ensuring pharmaceutical needs are undertaken by NHS commissioners rather than health and wellbeing boards, which are susceptible to local pressure
• Ensuring community pharmacy has access to the proposed Single Patient Record and the NHS App integrates with pharmacy businesses’ own systems
• Giving pharmacies access to phlebotomy capacity to ensure that pharmacies can provide a wider array of clinical services
• Commission new, funded clinical care to benefit from the changes to supervision and independent prescribing.