DPPsupport.co.uk – Unblocking the Independent Prescribing Pipeline to Release Productivity, Cut Cost and Build a Sustainable NHS Prescribing Workforce

West Yorkshire Training Hub with Antidote Medical

Project summary

DPPsupport.co.uk is a free, NHS-supported digital platform that has dismantled the single biggest productivity bottleneck in community pharmacy prescribing: access to a Designated Prescribing Practitioner (DPP). It is profession-agnostic, commissioner-ready, and engineered to deliver sustainable value for money across every Integrated Care System.

The problem we solved is structural. Only 14.1% of UK pharmacist FTE currently hold an Independent Prescribing (IP) qualification (Community Pharmacy Workforce Survey 2025). A large, experienced post-registration cohort cannot prescribe - not for clinical reasons, but because they cannot secure a DPP. Historically, supervision was rationed through informal networks, employer goodwill or private brokerage at c.£3,500 per trainee, with multi-month waits and the most deprived areas least likely to secure supply.

Outcomes delivered:

560+ IP trainees and 81 DPPs engaged

100+ successful trainee - DPP matches brokered

Typical supervision cost reduced from c.£3,500 to c.£1,500 (~57% reduction; c.£2,000 saved per trainee)

Cost avoided to date: c.£200,000+ released back into NHS / employer training budgets

83% of DPPs sit in IMD quintiles 1–3: the 60% most deprived areas

£105,000 awarded by NHS England North East and Yorkshire "Teach and Treat" funding to scale further

Each new IP released through the platform expands frontline NHS prescribing capacity in Pharmacy First, structured medication reviews, hypertension case-finding and contraception, substituting lower-cost community activity for higher-cost general practice and urgent care contacts.

Return on investment is high and structural rather than one-off. The platform's low-marginal-cost digital architecture means scale does not drive proportional cost; locally commissioned ICB demand has now replaced single-source funding; and a self-reinforcing pipeline (trainee → IP → DPP) compounds workforce capacity year on year.

Independent academic evaluation is led by Dr Clare Tolley at Newcastle University. Adoption is live across North East England, and also in Lancashire & South Cumbria and Norfolk & Suffolk ICBs, with Greater Manchester actively progressing – evidence that the model is genuinely replicable nationally. DPPsupport.co.uk is, in short, productivity, sustainability and value for money delivered through one platform.

What we did was build a national, free-to-use marketplace where DPPs publish capacity and trainees self-match by geography, sector and learning needs. Onboarding is digital, the matching algorithm preferentially channels capacity into deprivation, and the same architecture supports any regulated prescribing profession.