Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans his Department has to support pharmacies to play a greater role in primary care provision.

The Community Pharmacy Contractual Framework 2019-24 five-year deal, agreed with the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee in 2019, sets out how community pharmacy will further integrate into the National Health Service. This sets the ambition that community pharmacies will deliver more clinical services, embed their role in providing advice on medicines and preventing ill-health and further utilise the skills in community pharmacy to support the wider NHS

NHS111 can now refer patients to a community pharmacist for minor illness or the urgent supply of a prescribed medicine. At the end of 2020, we extended this service to general practitioner surgeries, who can now also formally refer patients to community pharmacy for consultation. We expect to introduce more clinical services in community pharmacy and play a larger role in primary care provision.