Community Pharmacy England’s director of NHS services Alastair Buxton has urged the government to use the £200 million it has allocated to bolster public health funding to increase locally commissioned community pharmacy services.

The Department of Health and Social Care said the 5.4 per cent increase in the public health grant to £3.858 billion over the next financial year will go towards smoking cessation programmes, sexual health clinics, addiction recovery and family and school nurses.

The DHSC also said “local health protection services and public health support for local NHS services” will benefit from the injection of funding and “local public health services will be given more money to deliver prevention programmes, tailored to their residents.”

However, local authorities have decommissioned community pharmacy-led services such as smoking cessation in recent years and cuts to local budgets for sexual health services have coincided with a rise in gonorrhoea and syphilis cases in England.

Insisting the new money should address that situation, Buxton (pictured) told Independent Community Pharmacist: “Community pharmacy teams have proved themselves to be vital assets in supporting key public health initiatives.

“The local commissioning of such services by councils has been impacted in recent years by reductions in public health budgets, so plans for increased funding from the Government is good news.

“And it should be used to increase the locally commissioned services that community pharmacies provide.”

A poll carried out by CPE in June last year found 96 per cent of 92 pharmacy owners representing 2,114 pharmacies in England had stopped providing locally commissioned services during the previous 12 months because of cost pressures.

Buxton said diverting the money towards locally commissioned pharmacy services would “align” with the strategy for developing community pharmacy’s role in prevention and population health which was published by Nuffield Trust and The King’s Fund in September 2023.

The DHSC did not respond when asked by ICP if it will use any of the £200 million to support the local commissioning of pharmacy services.