Thanks to the support from MP Sadik Al-Hassan, the team from HubRx, PillTime and Centred Solutions spoke to MPs in the House of Commons on the 19th of November, about just how important and urgent the proposed – but now delayed – changes to hub and spoke legislation are for the future of community pharmacy.
Community pharmacy is facing an uphill struggle. It’s been given the chance to flex its clinical muscle and make more profit through service delivery. But, due to the demand for dispensing increasingly larger volumes of prescriptions many pharmacies simply don’t have the capacity needed to do both.
For community pharmacy to help take some of the pressure away from overburdened GP practices – especially as we enter the winter period – and for them to add the value they are fully capable of to the NHS, something needs to change.
And we strongly believe that hub and spoke dispensing could provide community pharmacy with the extra capacity it needs. By using a hub to dispense 70% of repeat prescriptions, pharmacies in England could collectively help create an estimated 1.8m new patient appointments a year.
These are real benefits we’ve seen across our own Pharmacy+Health pharmacies by using HubRx. In just one year we’ve been able increase the delivery of NHS clinical services to patients by 400%.
We’ve released 15 hours a day of total staff time using HubRx to dispense 60% of repeat prescriptions. And we exceed the whole of last year’s flu and Covid vaccination volumes in the first three days of October.
We’ve asked MPs for their support to move ahead with hub and spoke legislation – specifically Model 1 where medicines are returned from the hub to the pharmacy ready to be dispensed to the patient – before it’s too late.