New Medicine Service

Support for pharmacy teams in England to successfully deliver the New Medicines Service.

The New Medicine Service (NMS) was the fourth Advanced Service to be added to the NHS community pharmacy contract; it commenced on 1st October 2011.

The service provides support for people with long-term conditions newly prescribed a medicine to help improve medicines adherence.

The New Medicine Service is also an ideal opportunity to not only enhance your own working practice by making a difference to the health and well-being of patients, but also to build relationships with patients and other healthcare providers.

NHS believe that the successful implementation of NMS will:

• improve patient adherence which will generally lead to better health outcomes
• increase patient engagement with their condition and medicines, supporting patients in making decisions about their treatment and self-management
• reduce medicines wastage
• reduce hospital admissions due to adverse events from medicines
• support the development of outcome and/or quality measures for community pharmacy.

To support NPA members understand and deliver NMS we have developed a range of resources including SOPs, marketing material and template data reporting forms.