CPAF: screening questionnaire from 6th June 2016 and update
Early last year NHS England approached PSNC to seek support for a revised CPAF process. The new process included a short screening questionnaire consisting of 10 questions which all pharmacies would be asked to complete. The information yielded would be considered with other information collated by NHSBSA and a number of pharmacies would then be asked to complete the full CPAF questionnaire – it was anticipated that many of these pharmacies would be visited for contract monitoring purposes. For the 2015/16 questionnaire NHS England requested NHSBSA to carry out the administration of CPAF at a national level on their behalf and this was facilitated by a secure on-line mechanism for contractors to complete their returns.
As outlined in the 2016/17 process and in order to align more with community pharmacies’ usual compliance timeframes – avoiding “pressure points” e.g. particular busy periods in community pharmacy such as the flu season, the 2016/17 CPAF screening questionnaire will be available via NHSBSA from Monday 6th June 2016 for four weeks until Monday 4th July 2016. It is anticipated that pharmacy contractors will receive an individual email with links to the CPAF screening questionnaire on or around  6th June 2016 if not slightly before this date.
NHS England will then identify a small number of pharmacies for a monitoring visit and some will be asked to complete the full CPAF questionnaire – as this is a lengthy document which includes questions related to all services, pharmacies are recommended to not leave this to the last minute before completing it.
The PharmOutcomes based CPAF is no longer used by NHS England teams but has been available to pharmacy contractors for self assessment purposes.
The full NHSBSA CPAF questionnaire is available as a PDF document on NHSBSA’s website for use as a training tool or to allow continuous monitoring of compliance against the community pharmacy contract.
