Pharmacies’ vital dispensing role under threat without urgent action
Despite saving the NHS billions, a new report highlights that community pharmacy dispensing remains undervalued, underappreciated, and under threat.
A new report by the Company Chemists’ Association (CCA) reveals the vital, yet underappreciated role that community pharmacy dispensing, the supply of NHS-prescribed medicines, plays within the NHS and across communities nationwide.
The report, covered by The i Paper, highlights how how community pharmacy dispensing is the backbone of accessible, safe, and equitable healthcare, but is under unsustainable pressure. The community pharmacy network provides an invaluable safety net for the NHS. Pharmacists prevented over 610,000 prescribing errors last year. These interventions not only protect patients from potential harm but also deliver significant savings—preventing incidents that would have cost the NHS nearly £600 million each year.1
The volume of NHS-prescribed medicines has surged by 17% in the past decade2 and shows no signs of slowing down. Yet, the national dispensing fee has only increased by 21p between April 2017 and April 20253, despite inflation rising almost 35% over this period.4 Additionally, more than one in four pharmacist roles are vacant in some regions.5
These challenges are placing a huge strain on community pharmacies, and their core function of dispensing, and require urgent action from the government.
Further to this, the report underscores the substantial, often unseen benefits, that dispensing provides to the NHS, taxpayers and patients. This includes:
Maintaining patient safety and preventing avoidable harm: Pharmacists prevented over 610,000 prescribing errors last year. These interventions not only protect patients from potential harm but also deliver significant savings—preventing incidents that would have cost the NHS nearly £600 million each year.1
– Providing expert care: Pharmacists dispense 15 billion items annually6, ensuring high-quality and efficient care. With patients visiting pharmacies up to 12 times more frequently than GPs7, pharmacy teams can easily identify changes in patient behaviour or act if a patient fails to collect their medicines.
– Saving taxpayers’ money: Pharmacies efficiently procure medicines on behalf of the NHS, saving taxpayers over £750 million annually.8 This is despite a significant rise in medicine expenditure, volume, and per-person usage from 2014 to 2024.
– Providing access where its most needed: over 90% of people in England live within a 20-minute walk of a pharmacy and there are more pharmacies in more deprived areas.9 Dispensing, therefore, is an equitable and accessible healthcare interaction. Pharmacies also deliver this function in a variety of settings, in high streets and health centres, out-of-town locations, supermarkets or through online providers.
The government’s 10-Year Health Plan for England states that over the next five years, community pharmacy will “transition…from being focused largely on dispensing medicines to becoming integral to the Neighbourhood Health Service, offering more clinical services”.10 The CCA’s report contends, however, that dispensing remains a fundamental part of this ‘transition’, central to the strategic shifts envisaged of the NHS. It highlights that dispensing, accounting for 85% of community pharmacy funding in England, is undervalued and underappreciated.
This position is echoed internationally by the World Pharmacy Council1 who state that dispensing is a core clinical service and the underfunding of it “compromises continuity of care…and timely equitable access to treatment”.11
The report urges the Government to take three steps to safeguard and strengthen the essential role of dispensing to meet their ambitions for the NHS:
1. Invest now to secure the future benefits of dispensing and the community pharmacy network. Immediate funding is needed to help close the gap between the cost of NHS dispensing and what the NHS currently pays for it. Without additional funding pharmacies will not be able to deliver essential services such as dispensing. This will likely lead to more harm to patients and increased costs to the taxpayer.
2. Ensure a robust future pharmacy workforce by expanding Independent Prescribing training and career pathways to strengthen clinical capacity and attract future talent. Empower pharmacists to resolve many prescribing errors, use flexibilities to manage medicine shortages, and update ‘supervision’ rules so pharmacy technicians can support safe, efficient dispensing.
3. Give pharmacists access to a single, shared patient record to support informed decisions and make interventions visible across care settings. Use pharmacy data and explore digital tools, including AI, to improve clinical assessment and patient safety.
Malcolm Harrison, Chief Executive of the Company Chemists’ Association, said:
“The report underscores the vital role of community pharmacies today and the critical role they will play in helping to deliver the government’s 10-year plan.
Dispensing, whilst often undervalued and overlooked, provides enormous benefits to patients, the NHS and taxpayers. Community pharmacies remain the cornerstone of local, accessible, high-quality healthcare, yet mounting pressures threaten their ability to fulfil this role. Decades of underfunding have weakened the sector, and without urgent investment and reform, patient access to essential services will be at risk.”
Read the CCA’s report on the value of community pharmacy dispensing
References
1. Community pharmacy’s interventions in relation to prescription errors resulted in an estimated cost saving to the NHS of £466.1 million in 2015, and an overall contribution to wider society of £542.4 million.
See Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee. The value of community pharmacy – detailed report [Internet]. 2016. Available from: https://cpe.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/The-value-of-community-pharmacy-detailed-report.pdf
We have calculated this value in today’s prices using HM Treasury. GDP deflators at market prices, and money GDP: June 2025 Quarter National Accounts [Internet]. GOV.UK; published 30 June 2025. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/gdp-deflators-at-market-prices-and-money-gdp-june-2025-quarterly-national-accounts gov.uk
2. NHS Business Services Authority. PD1 Reports [Internet]. Available from: https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/prescription-data/dispensing-data/pd1-reports
3. Community Pharmacy England (CPE), Dispensing Factsheet: Understanding the Single Activity Fee [Internet].2025. Available from: https://cpe.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Dispensing-Factsheet-Understanding-the-Single-Activity-Fee-2025.pdf
4. To calculate inflation over the period from April 2017 to April 2025, we used the official CPI index published monthly by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). See Office for National Statistics. Consumer price inflation time series [Internet]. 2025. Available from: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/timeseries/l55o/mm23
We took the CPI value for April 2017 and the CPI value for April 2025 from the same ONS time‑series and compared them. Inflation over the period is calculated by seeing how much the index increased between these two points. This approach follows the ONS method, where the CPI index shows how the prices of a standard basket of goods and services change over time.
5. Health Education England (HEE). Community Pharmacy Workforce Survey [Internet]. NHS England; published 22 Sep 2025 [cited 2025 Dec 11]. Available from: https://www.hee.nhs.uk/our-work/pharmacy/community-pharmacy-workforce-survey nhs.uk
6. nhsbsa.nhs.uk. (no date). PD1 Reports | NHSBSA. [online] Available at: https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/prescription-data/dispensing-data/pd1-reports
7. Maidment I, Young E, MacPhee M, Booth A, Wilcock J, Zubair M, et al. Rapid realist review of the role of community pharmacy in the public health response to COVID-19. BMJ Open. 2021;11:e050043.
8. Company Chemists’ Association, ‘Trying to save pennies is costing taxpayers pounds: the false economy of squeezing medicines pricing’, March 2025
9. Todd A, Copeland A, Husband A, et alThe positive pharmacy care law: an area-level analysis of the relationship between community pharmacy distribution, urbanity and social deprivation in England BMJ Open 2014;4:doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2014-005764
10. Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), Fit for the Future: The 10 Year Health Plan for England, July 2025.
11 World Pharmacy Council, Position Statement: Dispensing and Core Funding, July 2025.