Outsourcing hospital outpatient dispensing to community pharmacy providers is cost-effective and frees up hospital pharmacy staff to focus on clinical pharmacy services, according to a new report on delivering better value for money for the NHS in England. The community sector has a future role in dispensing discharge medication, it says.

The publication, which was conducted on an independent basis for the Department of Health, emphasises the intrinsic link between medicines optimisation and delivery of hospital pharmacy services, saying: “From a value perspective, [they] can’t be separated. Simply put, the NHS needs to focus the pharmacy workforce to drive optimal value and outcomes from the £6.7bn it spends on medicines.”

This can be achieved by increasing the amount of time pharmacists and pharmacy technicians spend on clinical work – with patients and other healthcare staff as well as independently – and reducing the proportion spent on infrastructure services such as the supply chain. These elements of hospital pharmacy provision are delivered more efficiently when undertaken through collaborative or sharedservice type models, at local, regional and national levels, the document says.

Labour peer and report author Lord Carter of Coles expresses disappointment at the variation in the approaches and scale of work currently being undertake to deliver the MO agenda. For example, the rate of prescribing pharmacists as a proportion of total hospital pharmacists currently varies from 2.5 to 71 per cent.

The work was commissioned by health secretary Jeremy Hunt, and follows the publication of an interim report last June, which described how reducing the variation in resource utilisation across the NHS in England could save at least £5bn of the £55.6bn spent by acute hospitals each year.

Lord Carter recommends the development of a Hospital Pharmacy Transformation Programme to be in place by April 2017 and overseen by the DH’s chief pharmaceutical officer and the recently created health sector regulator, NHS Improvement.