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Local GP groups will vote next week on whether the British Medical Association should push to have Pharmacy First scrapped due to “shortcomings” and the money “reallocated to general practice”.

The annual conference of local medical committees, which will be held on November 7 in Manchester, will consider a range of motions proposed for the BMA’s general practice committee to adopt as policy.  

The motions include one from Oxfordshire LMC that “notes the shortcomings of the Pharmacy First programme” such as its “limitations in scope, variability in service quality and the risk of fragmenting patient care”. 

Oxfordshire LMC also asserts that funding has been redirected from funding to general practice which “undermines the sustainability of primary care services” – a claim for which no evidence is provided – and argues that the money for Pharmacy First should be “reallocated to general practice, ensuring that patients receive diagnosis, treatment, and continuity of care from their GP team”. 

A separate motion from Oxfordshire LMC argues that “schemes such as Pharmacy First and the shift towards neighbourhood and multi-neighbourhood contracts” run the risk of “fragmenting patient care, eroding GP-patient relationships and undermining clinical outcomes”. 

This motion “calls for NHS policy to prioritise and protect continuity of care within general practice as a central measure of quality, funding, and system design”.

Meanwhile, a motion from Redbridge LMC calls for the conference to take the position that allowing community pharmacists to undertake chronic disease management “will create additional workload and professional responsibility for GPs”.

Redbridge LMC will argue that the NHS should clarify the role GPs will play in supporting pharmacies to carry out this role and that the GPC should “negotiate with NHSE a national tariff to reimburse general practice for both the time and clinical responsibility of supporting other primary care colleagues in providing care”. 

Dispensing doctors call for ‘equal treatment’

The conference will also consider a number of motions highlighting what one LMC describes as the “financial and structural pressures dispensing practices face” and calling for dispensing doctors to receive their first contractual funding uplift since 2013. 

Kernow LMC will argue that after investing “significant amounts” in staffing and infrastructure, dispensing doctors are at a “financial disadvantage compared with community pharmacies,” threatening the viability of roughly 15 per cent of the total general practice sector in England.

Oxfordshire LMC will call for the scrapping of the ‘one mile rule’ that prevents dispensing doctors from dispensing to patients who live within short distance from a community pharmacy so that the two sectors “can compete fairly” and patients “can choose where to have their prescriptions fulfilled”.

LMCs will also air their concerns that the new rules requiring surgeries to facilitate online appointments is “unfunded, unsafe and knowingly undeliverable” given the present workforce pressures in general practice, and call on GPCE to “prepare options for action, including non-compliance with access requirements” if the Government refuses to revise this. 

The dispute over online appointments was the background to a letter sent by LMC executives calling on surgeries to bypass the Pharmacy First service and send patients to A&E instead.  

At the 2024 LMC conference, a motion was passed criticising the “wastefulness” of the community pharmacy hypertension case-finding service and demanding that it be scrapped and the money put into pharmacy dispensing fees.  

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