CP & GP: Working Together

Primary Care Demand: Supporting General Practice and Community Pharmacy

Community Pharmacy contractors and teams are facing unprecedented pressures. In the past few months, we have collated the feedback from contractors and fed this back to the GM ICS leads, General Practice, wider Primary care and other NHS colleagues to address the pain points and pressures.

A task and finish group were convened by the GM ICS to review the feedback and agree a set of principles which could support the management of capacity and demand in Community Pharmacy and General Practice.

The Primary Care demand – Supporting General Practice and Community Pharmacy document linked here is a set of principles can be found here

This document will help community pharmacy pressures by providing recommendations to the system which include management of patient expectations, allowing sufficient time to process prescriptions, reducing urgent requests, and encouraging patient led ordering.

Contractors, Pharmacy teams and head office staff can use this document to facilitate local discussions to support management of capacity and demand.

There is ongoing engagement via LPCs, Community Pharmacy Provider Board and GM Primary Care at locality level to support local implementation and raise awareness of the pressures to prevent temporary closures and release capacity within community pharmacy.