NHS DISTANCE SELLING PHARMACY APPLICATIONS TO END ON 23 JUNE 2025
After 20 years of permitting NHS pharmacies to open as “distance selling” pharmacies in England without having to show any need for the pharmacy, the NHS has decided to close this option to new entrants from 23 June 2025 and no new application will be considered after that date. It is important to note that this has no impact on opening private online pharmacies and only applies to those who wanted to provide NHS services. For some time pharmacy organisations and CPE have been complaining that many NHS DSPs were not really offering services to the whole of England (as they say they should have been) and were only focusing on their own local areas. This accusation is probably correct, however, the Regulations only required a DSP to provide services to any patient in England who “requested” those services and there was no sensible way for the NHS to force DSPs to provide services across England if patients living many miles away were not requesting the services from the pharmacy.
This is not the complete end of DSPs. We are processing a lot of applications in the run up to the 23 June deadline. Even after the deadline, any NHS DSP that wants to relocate premises or has a change of ownership, will still have to go through what is essentially an entire new application process.
This is the last of the 4 exemptions that were introduced in 2005 to be scrapped and it is interesting that none of the original exemptions (100 hour, large retail parks, one stop primary care centres and DSPs) really worked as intended. It seems unlikely that we will see any more exemptions, but I do wonder why we even have this control of entry system for NHS pharmacies at all. All of the regulations governing the opening or relocating NHS pharmacies could easily be scrapped and the NHS could support pharmacies in rural areas to ensure that access was maintained, but that does not seem to be the way that the government is thinking.
I would also anticipate that the value of NHS DSP should increase in a similar manner to what happened when the 100 hour pharmacy exemption was removed.