NHS England has announced it will start rolling out the Electronic Prescription Services to prisons from September.

In an update yesterday (August 22), NHSE said the implementation of EPS across detained estate services will begin with two pilot sites next month, with a further five sites to go live in November. 

This will be followed by rollout “on a regional basis” between November 2024 and March 2025. 

The rollout “will allow prescriptions to be transmitted electronically between the prescriber at a detained estate site and the community pharmacy without the need for a physical FP10 prescription form,” said NHSE. 

Community Pharmacy England said these prescriptions “are expected to be relatively rarely seen in pharmacies” with NHS Business Services Authority figures indicating that  around 6,000 are currently issued by prisons every year. 

However, “the availability of EPS may influence future use of that route to supply medicines to people being discharged from prisons,” said the negotiator, adding that “tens of thousands of people are released from prison each year”.

CPE said: “Most people will be released from prison with a supply of their current medications, so they may not need to collect their EPS prescription immediately upon release.

“They are also likely to collect their prescription from a pharmacy far from the prison, as many people are detained a long distance from their homes." 

The organisation said that owing to this “uncertainty of where individuals will live after release,” the prescriptions could be non-nominated EPS prescriptions that must be retrieved from the NHS spine.