CPS Manifesto 2026: Infrastructure and Integration
Published: 8th January 2026
Community Pharmacy Scotland’s 2026 Manifesto sets out a bold vision for improving public health through prevention, detection, and treatment. Here’s why investment in infrastructure and integration is critical to achieving this ambition.
Our aim to do more to prevent, detect and treat ill health in Scotland is made clear in our Manifesto for the 2026 elections. We believe and have evidence to support that the network of community pharmacies in Scotland are capable of delivering initiatives like diabetes screening and weight management that can transform the course of people’s lives.
This will, however, only be possible with the right investment. We are calling not just for adequate funding to ensure that these services are sustainable, but also the practical support and resources required to further improve the efficiency of our current and future operations. In particular, the advent of paperless prescribing will bring the opportunity to revolutionise the way that our teams work – but we already know that this move will require a complete redesign of dispensing processes, changes to the software that our teams use and new hardware in most sites. Whilst every business has to adapt to change, our members need support to be able to realise the ambition of a truly paperless end-to-end prescribing and dispensing system for Scotland.
As we continue to evolve our clinical service offering, it becomes more and more important that our teams are supported to communicate openly back and forth with other health professionals and services. Not having the information needed to make a clinical decision is often cited by our Pharmacists as limiting their ability to support patients in the community pharmacy setting – leading to onward referrals that may not otherwise be necessary. Data sharing agreements and the technology to access and share relevant information are necessary to move forward safely and efficiently. This is particularly the case when it comes to the growing cohort of prescribing pharmacists whose time is better spent with people and patients than on manual administration tasks and handwriting prescriptions.
Our message is simple – to get the most out of the community pharmacy network, we first need to put some investment in.
The programme (Supporting documents - Programme for Government 2026 to 2031 - gov.scot) proposes radical reshaping of Scotland’s public services, focusing on structural reform rather than just new spending or isolated policy pledges.