The Company Chemists’ Association, the trade association for multiple pharmacies, has today published proposals for community pharmacy to become a natural home for patients to access routine primary care services. The 2025 Prospectus was formally launched at the CCA’s inaugural Conference, held on 11th September 2025.
Read the CCA’s 2025 Prospectus here
The proposals would provide an additional 51m primary care appointments annually, allowing general practice to focus on more complex primary care needs.
The 2025 Prospectus, based on extensive research and modelling undertaken by the CCA, sets out an ambitious roadmap for community pharmacy to take on an even bigger role in delivering urgent care, managing long-term conditions, and preventing ill-health.
The Prospectus proposes:
- 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.[1] [2]
- Empowering pharmacists to initiate treatment for high blood pressure, building on the success of the NHS Community Pharmacy Blood Pressure Check Service[3], before moving towards screening and initiating treatment for most routine long-term conditions.
- 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.[4]
- Commissioning a wrap-around NHS weight loss service and a ‘walk-in’ smoking cessation service.
- 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.
The 2025 Prospectus builds on the success of the CCA’s 2022 Prospectus[5]. Many of the 2022 proposals have now been implemented and the sector has undergone tremendous change in recent years.
The new and updated proposals set out today align closely with the role envisaged of community pharmacy in the recently published 10 year plan for the NHS and the government’s wider vision of a ‘leftward shift’ in healthcare.
Transformation of this kind will require several enablers to deliver the positive patient benefits envisaged, 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 providing bigger pharmacies and more consultation rooms for patients, by ensuring pharmaceutical needs are undertaken by NHS commissioners rather than Health and Wellbeing Boards which are susceptible to local pressure.[6]
- 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’[7] and independent prescribing.[8]
Malcolm Harrison, the Chief Executive of the CCA said: “Patients value the care and accessibility of local pharmacies but with the right investment there is so much more community pharmacies could do.
Pharmacies are well positioned to manage a wider range of common conditions, administer more vaccines, and provide wrap-around weight loss care, amongst other things.
By taking forward these bold proposals, pharmacies could free up 51m GP appointments each year, allowing GPs to focus on patients with more complex care needs”.
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NOTES TO EDITORS
Methodology
The data contained in the 2025 Prospectus is based on extensive analysis conducted by the CCA alongside its members, and analysis of publicly available NHS data.
References
[1] The 2025 Prospectus proposes moving the Pharmacy First minor illness service to a ‘walk-in’ model, enabling people who are unable to afford over-the-counter (OTC) medicine an access route through community pharmacy, preventing them from having to attend general practice altogether. The Prospectus also proposes expanding the Pharmacy First clinical pathways to cover new conditions – lower back pain, eye infections, chest infections, acne (simple), headaches and migraines.
[2] The Labour Party’s 2024 manifesto, ‘Change’ (13 June 2024), pledged to “create a Community Pharmacist Prescribing Service, granting more pharmacists independent prescribing rights where clinically appropriate”.
[3] Further detail on the NHS Community Pharmacy Blood Pressure Check Service is available here.
[4] Earlier this year, the CCA through the ‘Pharmacy Vaccinations Development Group’ published ‘Increasing Vaccination Uptake Through Community Pharmacy’ (28 February 2025) – a roadmap for harnessing community pharmacy to drive vaccine uptake by providing a wider range of NHS vaccines.
[5] CCA, A future for community pharmacy in England, 2022 proposed launching a Pharmacy First service, commissioning pharmacies to provide routine contraception, commissioning more vaccination services through pharmacies, and scaling up the blood pressure check service, amongst other things.
[6] Pharmaceutical Needs Assessments (PNAs) are written by Health and Wellbeing Boards within each of England’s 152 local authorities and assess local pharmaceutical needs. Their three-year cycle, susceptible to the influence of local politics, provide little confidence and certainty for businesses to invest.
[7] Legislation, currently passing through Parliament (the draft Human Medicines (Authorisation by Pharmacists and Supervision by Pharmacy Technicians) Order 2025), sets out a new legal framework for the supervision of dispensing and supply.
[8] From September 2026, all newly qualified pharmacists will be independent prescribers on the day of their registration.