Unscheduled Care Webinar - Recap
Published: 4th June 2026
Watch this Community Pharmacy Scotland Ask Me Anything session on the Unscheduled Care Service, featuring CPS's Policy team Gordon Winter, Adam Osprey and NHS24's Martin Burnside.
With over 600,000 patients accessing the service each year, this webinar provides practical guidance and answers to pharmacists' most frequently asked questions, helping pharmacy teams deliver safe, effective and patient-centred care across Scotland.
Key Takeaways
After reminding everyone that professional decision making must always be applied, the highlights from the event included:
Discussing how permissive the service and PGD have become to enable you to support patients who find themselves without the medication that they need and you do not have a prescription in hand.
We covered that supplies can be made to patients who have never been to your pharmacy before, and the item does not have to be on repeat to permit supply. In fact, the patient might never have had the item before!
The use of the Emergency Care Summary (or Clinical Portal, depending on your Health Board) was agreed to be a game-changer - so arrange for access via each Health board you work in if you haven't already done this!
Handling the most common exceptions was covered - for example utilising the emergency supply legislation for patients not registered with a Scottish GP practice or working with local NHS services to arrange for Controlled Drug prescribing where absolutely necessary.
We encouraged all the attendees to read the full service detail at https://www.communitypharmacy.scot.nhs.uk/unscheduled-care/ - this is also where you will also find the excellent A-Z lookup tool which helps you identify which medicines can be supplied under the PGD (Hint: almost everything!)
A great question from the audience about supplying testing strips reminded us all that the A-Z lookup tool only lists medicines, but the service and PGD permit the supply of appliances and ACBS items too - so the Scottish Drug Tariff is another reference source that can be useful!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
-
The Unscheduled Care Service helps patients access urgently needed medicines when they are unable to obtain a prescription in time. It supports continuity of care and helps reduce pressure on other parts of the NHS, particularly out-of-hours services.
-
The service was introduced in 2005 to provide a structured and patient-focused approach to urgent medicine supply, replacing less formal arrangements that previously existed.
-
Unscheduled care refers to situations that cannot reasonably be planned in advance and where a patient requires timely access to medicines to avoid disruption to their treatment.
CP Independent Prescribers and trainees should tell CPS about employment or other changes to keep their contact records up to date.