Pharmacy Contract Monitoring

NHS England’s Area Teams (ATs) have responsibility for monitoring the provision of Essential and Advanced services. Arrangements for monitoring locally commissioned services may be set out in local contracts or Service Level Agreements.

ATs currently use the Community Pharmacy Assurance Framework (CPAF) to monitor pharmacy contractors’ compliance with the terms of the community pharmacy contractual framework (CPCF).

Community Pharmacy Assurance Framework (CPAF)

As part of the support to the NHS on the implementation of the CPCF, Primary Care Commissioning (PCC) was asked to co-ordinate and support the work of Strategic Health Authorities and PCTs in developing a toolkit for assessing compliance and quality under the new contract arrangements. The first toolkit was published in September 2005 as the CPAF and updated versions were produced by PCC, working with PSNC, over the subsequent years.

CPAF is made up of two parts – a pre-visit questionnaire which is completed by the pharmacy contractor before the monitoring visit and a section used by the commissioner during a monitoring visit.

In 2013 NHS England updated CPAF; this new version is available on the NHS England website. NHS England’s Area Teams (AT) used this version of the CPAF to undertake contract monitoring during 2013/14.

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