Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to expand existing public health and prevention services in community pharmacies in order to support the aims of the NHS Long Term Plan.

Both the NHS Long Term Plan and the ‘Prevention is Better than Cure’ vision document, published in November 2018, set out an ambition to encourage more people to make the most of their local pharmacy to stay well in the community. Within the prevention vision, the value of the advice and wide range of lifestyle and public health interventions being delivered by more than 9,500 community pharmacies already accredited as healthy living pharmacies was recognised. In line with this, the NHS Long Term Plan outlines an aim for voluntary sector partners, community pharmacists and general practitioner practices to work together to facilitate opportunities for the public to check on their health, through tests for high blood pressure and other high-risk conditions.

The Department is now developing a Green Paper to further work up this ambition and plans for delivering it. This will be published later this year.

Alongside this, the Department, with NHS England, has now begun negotiations to determine the Community Pharmacy Contractual Framework for 2019/20 and beyond. These are confidential negotiations and as such we are unable to provide further detail at this time.