Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he plans to require pharmacists to review medicine prescriptions to ensure that patients are not prescribed medication that is no longer necessary.

Structured Medicine Reviews are already offered by general practices, where, increasingly, prescriber qualified pharmacists are part of multi-disciplinary teams, to review and optimise patients’ medication, which includes deprescribing where appropriate.

Pharmacists in community pharmacy are currently required to undertake a check on all prescriptions to ensure they are clinically appropriate before dispensing. Expanding the ability for pharmacists working in this setting to prescribe/deprescribe will require more pharmacist independent prescribers and the development of underpinning systems.

From 2026, newly graduated pharmacists will come out of university with a prescribing qualification, and we are upskilling the existing work force. We have also committed in the recent plan for Primary Care to improving the digital infrastructure to support more services being offered in community pharmacy. NHS England will start piloting prescribing services in community pharmacy this summer.