In April 2026, (prior to the CPWS release), the PDA published a report on the total system capacity for England’s pharmacies which looked at the first two full years of Pharmacy First data and consolidated this with wider dispensing, services and workforce datasets.
In response to this PDA report, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said that future service provision ‘would be informed by the 2025 Community Pharmacy Workforce Survey’. The survey results were published on 18 May 2026.
However, there are other datasets which, when combined with the CPWS data helps us to understand the broader picture of pharmacist numbers and the main settings they work in.
The PDA’s latest analysis of these datasets for the last five years confirms the concerning trend of a decreasing number of pharmacists per community pharmacy who are being expected to provide increasing volumes of pharmacy services and dispensing.
The data shows that there is a continuing rise in the total number of pharmacists joining the register, a trend that is expected to accelerate with the significant increase in the number of students at the new schools of pharmacy, and the increase in the number of OSPAP students.
Despite the nearly eight thousand increase in the total number of pharmacists on the GPhC register in the period 2021-2025, the number of those employed in community settings in England declined by nearly 3,000. In the context of the sustained increase in workload and the introduction of new pharmacy services as part of the Community Pharmacy Contractual Framework, it is unclear why the number of pharmacists employed in community has decreased.
Headlines from the report include;
- There has been a reduction of 2,840 full time pharmacist roles from community pharmacy in the period 2021 to 2025. This is despite the substantial rise in services volume in the same period.
- The total number of registered pharmacists in England has increased between 2021 and 2025 by 7,955.
- Data show that full time equivalent (FTE) pharmacists working in primary care have increased by approximately 5,000 between 2021 and 2025.
- The dataset for pharmacists working in secondary care shows an increase of approximately 2,000 in the period 2021-2026.
Read the FULL report here
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