Pharmacies provide nearly 70 million ‘unfunded’ consultations annually
Pharmacies are valuable healthcare assets, meeting increasing public demand. However, a substantial portion of their capacity is consumed by unfunded work.
According to Community Pharmacy England’s (CPE) 2024 Pharmacy Advice Audit, community pharmacies conduct over 1.3 million unfunded consultations each week,
equating to 69 million annually.
The average pharmacy completes around 22 of these consultations daily, each taking approximately 5.6 minutes of staff time —adding up to over two hours daily.
This represents nearly 50 per cent more consultations than in 2020 and a 78 per cent increase in time spent on unfunded healthcare advice since the 2020 audit.
The audit, which surveyed over a third (3,916) of community pharmacies in England earlier this year, also highlights that pharmacies handle nearly 150,000 informal
referrals from GPs and NHS 111 each week.
All these referrals could have been routed through the Pharmacy First service, which would have potentially secured over £115 million in funding for the sector, the
CPE noted.