**"NHS Weight-Loss Injections Set for Flu-Like Rollout—if Supply Meets Demand"**

Pharmacists are ready to offer weight-loss jabs to NHS patients, but only if the funding is right and supply is safeguarded, chemists have told The i Paper .

Currently GPs can prescribe Mounjaro to NHS patients who meet strict criteria, but under the Health Secretary’s plans, the jabs will eventually be available to eligible patients via pharmacies .

The Government has not yet set out a timeline for the rollout, but one pharmacist told The i Paper he could begin to provide patients with the jabs immediately.

Olivier Picard, chair of the National Pharmacy Association, is already providing weight-loss jabs to private patients. Those who can afford to pay for Mounjaro can access it privately.

But NHS patients currently face strict thresholds to access via their GPs . NHS eligibility guidance states that patients must be aged over 18, with a BMI above 40 or 37.5+ if from a Black, Asian, or other minority ethnic background.

Patients must also have a confirmed diagnosis of at least four out of the following five health conditions: hypertension (high blood pressure) needing medication, sleep apnoea, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and hypercholesterolaemia (high cholesterol).

Mr Picard said: “I can start tomorrow. If the NHS is serious about it, there are thousands of pharmacies who offer a service privately. Those pharmacies will have already been trained.”

He added that any delay in the rollout would not be due to pharmacists but NHS decision-making, and potentially, supply issues around the jabs becoming more widely available.

“I think that the manufacturer of the drugs would struggle to supply the market in sufficient quantity, because we’re already seeing that now,” he said.

Mr Picard also said the right amount of funding would need to be made available and it would have to be significantly more than the £15-£20 pharmacists receive for Pharmacy First consultations, as pharmacists will not engage if the NHS try to “get this on the cheap”.

“What we can’t do is do it for the price of an NHS prescription or something like this, because the clinical skills of the pharmacists will typically be used in many cases,” he said.

He said pharmacists tend to spend 20-30 minutes with each patient in a private weight loss consultation and there is no reason it would be different for NHS patients.

“If we’re going to do a two-way consultation, we’re going to talk about diet and exercise, we’re going to talk about medication and it’s going to take 30 minutes, the fee payable to the pharmacy has to be maybe £120, £150 an hour.”

Mr Picard said in some cases the cost of a consultation alone could be “more likely to be £180 an hour”, depending on the complexity of patients.

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Malcolm Harrison, chief executive of the Company Chemists’ Association, said as the weight-loss jab rollout would be additional service, it would require additional funding to be delivered.

Funding aside, Mr Harrison said the pharmacy sector has a “strong track record of bringing online schemes” such as Covid and flu vaccinations and he cannot see any obstacles as to why a weight-loss jab service could not be commissioned “fairly rapidly”.

“Businesses don’t run with latent capacity but they have the capacity to scale up quickly,” he said. “I’m fairly confident that it could be done with pace, considering a lot of business are already offering these services privately.”

He said he sees a operating similarly to the flu jab service pharmacies provide, which sees the NHS set a tight eligibility criteria for free vaccination, but also gives people who do not meet the threshold the option to opt in privately.

Rob Severn, a pharmacist based in Nottingham, said: “The way we work has changed and I think pharmacies are well-placed to help with the weight management.”

But Mr Severn, who completed additional training to equip him to provide weight-loss services to patients, said training would need to be built into any NHS weight-loss jab funding package for pharmacy contractors to make sure they get a “fair return”.