01.13.2026 Shelley Gibbins
The Company Chemists’ Association’s (CCA) latest report, The Value of Community Pharmacy Dispensing, has been published at a critical moment for community pharmacy in England. The report paints a compelling picture of how medication dispensing, often under‑appreciated, is fundamental to the NHS’s ambitions to shift care into communities and support patients.
The report highlights the serious pressures community pharmacies face including rising prescription volumes, a reduction in real‑term funding and workforce shortages that threaten the dispensing process.
As the NHS works towards a more community‑focused health service, one growing model of dispensing deserves serious attention - hub and spoke. Hub and spoke isn’t the golden panacea, but if done correctly with the right support, it could provide much‑needed capacity in pharmacy, improve efficiency, and free up pharmacists to deliver more clinical care.
Our Head of Marketing, Shelley Gibbins, explains more.
The Pressure on Traditional Community Dispensing
Community pharmacies now dispense more than 1.15 billion prescription items each year, a 17% increase over the past decade, yet funding for this essential work has not followed pace.
This imbalance has serious consequences with pharmacies over-stretched, trying to maintain safe, timely dispensing while also providing broader clinical services like Pharmacy First. Exacerbating this are workforce shortages, with some areas experiencing vacancy rates of more than one in four pharmacist positions.
In this environment, every inefficiency matters. Even minor delays in dispensing can ripple out and have an impact on patient care, adherence and trust, especially for those managing complex, chronic conditions. The traditional dispensing model, where every pharmacy handles all aspects of dispensing onsite, simply isn’t flexible enough to absorb these pressures without reform.
Hub and Spoke: The Opportunity
Hub and spoke dispensing separates out the repetitive, high‑volume aspects of dispensing into a central “hub,” while local pharmacies, the spoke, retains clinical oversight and handles patient‑facing responsibilities such as counselling, checking and supply of urgent items.
While a growing number of larger groups and online pharmacies have been moving to this model, legislative restrictions and a lack of clarity have limited deployment across the wider community pharmacy sector. Recent Government consultations acknowledge the benefits, saying automation and centralised processes in hubs could reduce error rates, improve turnaround times and allow pharmacists in spokes to focus on the most clinically valuable work.
Yet six months on from the legislation change progress remains slow and, without adequate funding, many pharmacies remain concerned about the perceived investment for a hub network.
How Hub and Spoke Helps - A Closer Look
1. Freeing Up Pharmacists to Deliver Clinical Care
One of the strongest arguments for hub and spoke isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about enabling the future of pharmacy practice. The NHS’s ten‑year plan emphasises shifting care into the community and expanding clinical roles for pharmacists and pharmacy technicians.
By centralising routine dispensing tasks, spokes can allocate more pharmacist time to clinical services such as medication reviews, pharmacy first consultations, hypertension checks, chronic disease support and proactive patient engagement.
Hub and spoke aligns with the NHS’s goals of prevention, personalised care, and reducing pressure on GPs and hospitals.
2. Improving Safety and Reducing Errors
Government guidance on hub and spoke indicates that, with appropriate safeguards and automation, centralised hubs can reduce dispensing errors. Our own analysis at Centred Solutions backs this up with 100% of FLOWRx customers saying hub and spoke had improved patient safety in their group.
It is important to remember that automation doesn’t replace professional oversight, it provides a safety net. With FLOWRx carrying out multiple checks with barcode scanning, RFID and guiding light technology, pharmacists and technicians at the spokes have more focussed time for clinical checking.
FLOWRx also provides end‑to‑end visibility, ensuring spokes are never “in the dark” about what’s happening with a prescription.
3. Increasing Operational Resilience
The current financial model for dispensing, where 85% of community pharmacy income comes from the Single Activity Fee, has not kept pace with the expanding volume of work.
Hub and spoke provides a pathway to improved resilience through new models like a JointVenture Co-operative, because it allows participating pharmacies to share infrastructure costs, achieve economies of scale and invest in technology that would be expensive for an individual branch. By pooling resources, small chains or independents could access efficiencies previously available only to larger organisations.
Explore The Return On Investment of FlowRX
What Needs to Happen Next
Realising the true potential of hub and spoke dispensing will only happen with the right sector support, education and funding incentives.
To increase the opportunity of hub and spoke adoption, additional reimbursement for hub related costs, such as IT integration, transport and automation should be considered in the next round of funding talks between Community Pharmacy England and the Department of Health. The CCA’s report makes a strong case that dispensing is undervalued, any reform must include funding mechanisms that recognise the cost of safe, high‑quality dispensing and reward pharmacies for participating in efficiency‑boosting models.
The CCA’s report is a timely reminder of how essential community pharmacy is to the NHS and to patients. It also highlights that the status quo is unsustainable without reform and investment. Hub and spoke dispensing should be viewed as a practical, patient‑centred evolution of the NHS’s medicines supply chain.
With policies that support innovation, funding that reflects the real costs of dispensing and a regulatory framework that enables modern operating models, hub and spoke can help pharmacies become even more integral to community health. It can create capacity for clinical care, improve safety and build resilience into a system under enormous strain.
If you are ready to improve accuracy, reduce manual workload and free your team to focus on patient care, we are here to support you.
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