Remote New Medicine Service and Pharmacy Contraception consultations

Two services that already work at a distance

The New Medicine Service (NMS) and the NHS Pharmacy Contraception Service (PCS) are two advanced services a community pharmacy can offer without the patient and pharmacist sharing a room. Both are structured conversations rather than hands-on examinations, which is why NHS England permits them to be delivered by telephone or video.

That makes them a natural fit for a remote model that adds consultation capacity without funding a second pharmacist on site. If you want to see the wider set of services this supports, our services overview and how it works pages set out the full picture.

Remote New Medicine Service (NMS)

NMS supports a patient starting a new medicine for certain long-term conditions across three stages: an engagement stage, an intervention, and a follow-up. The service pays £28 in total: £14 for the intervention and £14 for the follow-up. Both the intervention and the follow-up can be carried out by telephone or by video, so neither stage requires the patient to come back into the pharmacy.

Because the value of NMS is in the conversation, it can be handled by a pharmacist consulting remotely rather than tying up the on-site team while they dispense. Where that pharmacist works from a separate registered pharmacy, treat the cross-premises arrangement as one to confirm with Community Pharmacy England and NHS England first (see the section below). No official source yet settles whether one off-site pharmacist can cover activity for several separate premises. Clinical notes stay aligned to the service structure and the NHS claim continues to flow through the pharmacy's own NHS-assured system.

Remote Pharmacy Contraception Service (PCS)

The Pharmacy Contraception Service lets a pharmacist initiate or continue routine oral contraception and, since 29 October 2025, supply oral emergency contraception. It pays £25 per initiation or continuation consultation and £20 per oral emergency contraception consultation, alongside a one-off £400 set-up fee. Consultations can be delivered by telephone or audio, or by video.

There is one condition that shapes how you run it remotely: the consultation must be provided from the pharmacy premises. PCS can be remote in the sense that the patient is on a phone or a screen, but at the pharmacist's end it is anchored to a registered pharmacy.

Where the pharmacist has to be

Remote delivery does not mean working from home. Across NHS pharmacy services the expectation is consistent: a pharmacist providing a remote consultation must be at registered pharmacy premises when they do it. For PCS this is written into the service specification, and the same premises-based professional expectation frames how NMS is delivered.

In the Remote Pharmacist model this is by design. The consultation runs from a secure terminal in the pharmacy's existing consultation room, and the GPhC-registered pharmacist on the other end is themselves consulting from registered pharmacy premises. The on-site Responsible Pharmacist always stays on the premises and is never replaced, and the platform does not provide remote supervision of dispensing. One point is still open: whether a single off-site pharmacist can cover several separate premises is not settled by any official source, so confirm that arrangement with Community Pharmacy England and NHS England before you rely on it. Our notes on delivering services remotely explain how the premises rule plays out in practice.

GPhC safeguards when you prescribe or supply at a distance

The GPhC's guidance for registered pharmacies providing pharmacy services at a distance (February 2025) is not a ban on remote care. It asks for risk-based professional judgement. Its central safeguard is that for higher-risk medicines the prescriber must not rely on an online questionnaire alone. The information a patient gives has to be independently verified.

If that information cannot be verified, or if it is not safe to prescribe, the patient should be redirected to an appropriate care provider. That redirect route matters operationally: a remote consultation should be able to convert to a face-to-face appointment or a referral whenever seeing the patient in person is the safe option.

Weight-management and other higher-risk requests

The GPhC singles out weight-management medicines as a worked example. Before supplying, the prescriber must verify the patient's weight, height and BMI, and the guidance states plainly that a telephone call alone is not adequate for this. Acceptable verification is by video, in person, or through the patient's records.

The practical takeaway is that the delivery channel has to match the clinical risk. A phone call is fine for an NMS follow-up conversation; a weight-loss supply needs to see the patient or their records. Building that judgement into how each service is set up keeps you inside both the service specifications and the distance-selling guidance.

Consent, the record and the claim

Remote or not, each of these services still needs a contemporaneous, defensible record. Consent is captured at the start, clinical notes follow the structure of the service, and an append-only, hash-chained audit trail records who did what and when. Recording, where it is used at all, is consent-gated and off by default.

NHS claims for NMS and PCS continue to flow through the pharmacy's own NHS-assured system, so remote delivery does not change how you get paid, only where the consultation happens. You can read more about the assurance model on our security and clinical safety page.