The Pharmacy Manual forms part of a suite of policies and procedures to support commissioning and contract management of primary care.

These policies and procedures support quality and consistency of commissioning and eliminate duplication of effort in the management of the four primary care contractor groups.

All policies and procedures have been designed to support the principle of proportionality. By applying these policies and procedures, commissioners should be able to respond to local issues within a national framework.

The policies are underpinned by five key principles:

• To support the continuous improvement of primary care
• To maintain the right balance between operating in a consistent fashion, maintaining appropriate local flexibility
• Clear alignment with NHS England commissioning policy and NHS England business plan.
• Compliance with legislation
• To support a reasonable, proportionate and consistent approach across the four primary care contractor groups.

This suite of documents will be refined in light of feedback from users. Please send your feedback to england.communitypharmacy@nhs.net clearly stating in the subject header “Policy feedback: policy name”. This email address should only be used by NHS colleagues and contractors. Members of the public, patients, and their representatives should contact our Customer Contact Centre: england.contactus@nhs.net.

• Pharmacy Manual
• Pharmacy Manual – list of annexes
• Pharmacy Manual – template forms

Please see below to access additional policies:

• Dental policies
• Eye health policies
• Performer list policies

For information on the Pharmacy Quality Scheme, please go to Pharmacy Quality Scheme.