As the NHS Pharmacy Contraception Service has passed the one-year milestone, pharmacist Julie Grigg from Wicker Pharmacy in South Yorkshire describes how the use of the service has helped younger patients in the area access contraceptive services.

The aim of the NHS pharmacy contraception service is to offer people greater choice and access when considering starting or continuing their current form of oral contraception.

In December 2023 the service was expanded to include both initiation of oral contraception and to provide ongoing supplies.  We have been delivering the service since then and we’re seeing a lot of patients coming in to use our service.

Back in the beginning

To make sure we had people walking through our doors to use the service from the very start, our pharmacy team went out and spoke to local surgeries. We’ve got a couple of surgeries that now send all their contraceptive pill consultations to us – we do get a regular flow of bookings coming in this way.

We’ve got an online booking system, so if people go on our website, it’s quite easy to make a booking online. This is really helpful because it comes through as an e-mail, so you’ve got the patient name, their NHS number and date of birth. This means you can prefill in the first part of the online consultation form on the IT system, and it can make your consultation that little bit quicker.

We’ve also got leaflets with a QR code on that link to our website which we can hand out to patients. Anybody coming in with a prescription from their GP for the contraceptive pill will receive one of these attached to the bag with their supply within it. They know that they can then come to us the next time, and we can carry out a consultation and provide their supply of an oral contraceptive such as the combined or progestogen only (‘mini’) pill.

The Wicker Pharmacy is a late night, city centre pharmacy and we supply a lot of emergency hormonal contraceptives. We deliver over a hundred consultations each month. Many women we see aren’t using any regular contraception at all or have encountered unanticipated problems with their usual method. When we supply emergency contraception, we also offer these women an oral contraception consultation. If we didn’t have this opportunity to discuss future contraception methods, we would have to signpost them to the GP or Sheffield Sexual Health Services for longer term contraception support.

Due to this intervention, we’re seeing a high percentage of people starting their use of contraception with us – more than half of our customers using this service are at the initiation stage. In about half of those initiations the individual has never used oral contraception before, whereas the other half had, but for whatever reason had stopped.

Offering Community Pharmacy services in a university city

We see a lot of younger women and teenagers as in Sheffield we have two big universities. I think the perceived barrier to accessing non-urgent care from a GP practice, and the embarrassment factor of going to sexual health services have a part to play in our success. With the GP, patients often have to phone up first thing in the morning to get an appointment and there is also the possibility that students may not be registered with a GP locally. Some women may also feel there is a little bit of a stigma attached to seeking sexual health services. There’s a big potential for us to see more people in the pharmacy as that’s an easier thing to do for most people.

The vast majority of customers use our online booking system, but we accommodate walk-ins because if we can help them when they’re initially looking for both emergency contraception and a longer-term oral contraception service, we can help them with their contraceptive services going forward.

Consultations take around 10 to 20 minutes – we try and book ours in for times when there’s another pharmacist so we can take the time to help select the contraceptive option that is best for them. I can be in the consultation room and know there’s another pharmacist out there in the dispensary, so patients aren’t going to have to wait while you’re doing the consultation.

Clinical services within Community Pharmacy

Patients are always really happy with the way it all works. Many of those referred to us by their GP, are quite surprised they’ve been told to go to the pharmacy.

Thanks to this service and Pharmacy First the public are slowly starting to realise there are clinical services that can be offered in the community by Community Pharmacists.

It’s really satisfying to be able to help people in this way and in the future I hope the service expands so we can offer even more options to patients.

For more information about the NHS Contraception Service visit NHS England » NHS Pharmacy Contraception Service

Pharmacist Julie Grigg