POS-2026-3008: Impact and Safety Evaluation of Pharmacy First

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a significant backlog in hospital care, contributing to an increased demand for GP appointments. In response, the Government commissioned the Pharmacy First (PF) service, launched in February 2024. Part of Pharmacy First is a clinical pathways service to assess and manage seven common conditions, including the supply of prescription only medicines where appropriate, after consultation with a community pharmacist.

The service aims to enable patients to access care in quicker and more convenient ways, which aims to relieve some of the pressures on both general practices and hospitals.

We will assess what effect the introduction of the service has had on GP appointments, hospital use, and antibiotic use associated with each of the seven conditions. We will see how these changed alongside the increase in recorded Pharmacy First consultations in England. We will also look at how changes in the number of consultations at general practices and hospitals are affected by deprivation, ethnicity, age, gender, geographical region, and the patient’s number of other health conditions.

Finally, we will assess the safety of the PF service in terms of outcomes for the patient. We will look at if there is a difference in hospitalisations rates for patients who access PF versus those who access usual GP care. We will also find out if patients have accessed another healthcare setting (GP, A&E, hospital admission) within 30 days of a PF consultation for the same condition where no referral by the pharmacist has been made.