Community Pharmacist Consultation Service (CPCS)
The service connects patients who have a minor illness or need an urgent supply of a medicine with a community pharmacy.
General practices can refer patients for a minor illness consultation via CPCS, once a local referral pathway has been agreed. As well as referrals from general practices, the service takes referrals to community pharmacy for minor illness or if a patient needs an urgent supply of a medicine from NHS 111 and NHS 111 online.
From 15th May 2023, 999 services or providers of urgent and emergency care who are authorised by NHS England to provide this (for example, Urgent Treatment or Urgent Care Centres, an Emergency Department or an Accident and Emergency Unit) can also make referrals to community pharmacy for minor illness or if a patient needs an urgent supply of a medicine.
The CPCS provides the opportunity for community pharmacy to play a bigger role than ever within the urgent care system.
To register to provide this service, the contractor must complete the CPCS registration declaration within the MYS portal.
Once registered for the service, contractors must be able to receive and complete any referrals made to them by NHS 111, as referrals could commence at any time following registration. A pharmacy’s registration on the MYS portal will be notified to the local Directory of Service lead and a profile for the CPCS service will be set up for the pharmacy. Only at that point will patients be referred to the contractor
From 31st January 2024 (subject to the required IT systems being in place), the service will be moved the new Pharmacy First service (Advanced service). Read more about this:
Payment
When a pharmacy provides the service, they can claim a £14 fee per completed consultation.
All payments must be claimed via the NHSBSA Manage Your Service (MYS) portal; no paper-based claims process is available for the service. The CPCS IT system (Sonar or PharmOutcomes) will be able to pre-populate claim information in MYS each month, so that the contractor then just needs to login to MYS at the start of the following month to confirm that the information is correct and to submit the claim.
IT
From 1st April 2020, the pharmacy must have IT equipment accessible within the consultation room to allow contemporaneous records of the CPCS consultations to be made within the CPCS IT system.
CPCS Service Specification Annex D Key Contact Details for Nottingham and Nottinghamshire (provided by NHS England) is available by contacting Alison @ Community Pharmacy Nottinghamshire.
Annex D provides:
- details of how the pharmacist can access the NHS 111 healthcare professionals’ line (for access to a clinician, to seek advice when the patient’s own general practice is not available)
- A link to the Directory of Services search tool
- NHS DoS provider and commissioner helpline contact details (for service disruption or to provide non urgent DoS feedback)
- Local NHS England team contact email
More information and updates can be found on the PSNC website – https://psnc.org.uk/services-commissioning/advanced-services/community-pharmacist-consultation-service/
