What is the New Medicine Service (NMS)?

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NMS forms part of the Advanced Services within the Community Pharmacy Contractual Framework (CPCF).

This service provides support to people who are newly prescribed a medicine to manage a long-term condition (LTC). This will generally help them to appropriately improve their medication adherence and self-manage their LTC.

NMS monthly payment

A monthly payment will be paid for each completed full-service intervention.

The fee per intervention will be dependent on the number of interventions achieved for the month and whether any target has been achieved based on the monthly prescription volume of the pharmacy.

The payment to be made per NMS intervention and the number of NMS interventions required per month to reach a target, can be found in Part VIC of the Drug Tariff.

If you fail to reach the first target level (10%) then all full NMS interventions provided will be paid at £20 each.

Where a target level is reached, all the full NMS interventions provided up to that point are paid at the rate corresponding to the target. Payment will be made up to the maximum number of full NMS interventions.

If you dispense more than 10,500 items per month, the volume bandings will continue to increase in increments of 1,000 items per month. The number of full NMS interventions required to meet the activity threshold will also increase.

Payment is limited to 1% of the contractors’ eligible monthly prescription volume.

NMS claim figures

You can view your NMS figures on your Schedule of Payments.

You can also view the NMS figures on the Information Services section of the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) website.

You can search for your pharmacy using ‘Ctrl and F’ and enter your OCS code into the search box.

The NMS figure for that month is shown in column S.

The information is collated from the monthly submissions made by pharmacy contractors. The information is available after the payment schedules have been sent for the dispensing month.