General Practice Community Pharmacist Consultation Service (GP CPCS)

After a successful pilot across the UK, the NHS will be rolling out General Practice Community Pharmacist Consultation Service (GP CPCS) nationally.

The aim is for community pharmacists to work closely with the local GP teams to reduce pressure on GP appointments. This will help to create some additional capacity for the practice to book patients into appointments that might, otherwise, have been filled that day, or in a few days’ time depending on the nature of the symptoms the patient reports.

The aim is also to identify ways that individual patients can self-manage their health more effectively with the help of community pharmacists and to recommend solutions that could encourage the use of pharmacy as a first point of contact for minor illness symptoms in the future.

The service is intended to be a high quality and effective clinical urgent care service provided by community pharmacy through a referral from a GP practice, enabling convenient and easy access to a healthcare professional for patients.

Before GPs can start to make referrals, there must be local discussions to agree how this will work. These discussions will involve pharmacy contractors and general practices within your Primary Care Network (PCN) alongside the Local Pharmaceutical Committee (LPC) representative who will be training all involved and implementing the system across the board.

Please discuss within your PCN and other colleagues.