October 9th 2026

By Ailsa Colquhoun

DDA26: Potential EPS efficiency savings are being unrealised

A 66 per cent reduction in the number of prescription processing sites and three times less paper to sort – these are the among the benefits to the NHS of electronic prescribing, NHSBSA officials Phil Edwards, head of pharmaceutical services, and Principal Pharmacist and Business Engagement Lead Mark Gibbon told the audience at the DDA 2026 Conference.

In addition, NHSBSA has been able to reduce the number of staff working in prescription processing by half, and could reduce the amount of storage space by 88 per cent due to electronic prescribing, they said.

It is the view of the DDA that such savings in NHS prescription processing costs should be reallocated to funding the EPS for dispensing GPs.

Among the benefits for practices are reduced referred back items and script submission administration, and zero wrong group movements, according to the presentation on day two of the conference, entitled: Improving Dispensary Submissions to the NHSBSA.

The NHSBSA team told the conference that as of July 2026, dispensing GPs account for over three in four paper items still submitted for pricing – some 6.7 million items - and that paper items accounted for around 8 per cent of the total item processing by NHSBSA. They said that only 85 dispensaries were live with the EPS – around 9.46 per cent of all dispensaries. DDA advice is that dispensing practices should not privately fund the EPS.

The presentation also looked at the following areas:

• FP34D and appendix submissions
• Submitting your account – best practice
• How we process your work
• Wrong Group Movement – Switching
• Endorsements and prescriber amendments

The NHSBSA team urged dispensing practices to take care with posting their paper prescriptions. They said: “One bad parcel can be crucial to the staff's daily output.”

Presentation slides (available until Nov 1)