A Community Pharmacy–Based Diabetes Review Service in Southampton: Needs Assessment, Service Design and Projected Impact

Abstract

Diabetes mellitus is a leading contributor to preventable morbidity, yet the structured annual care that limits its complications is delivered incompletely: in England only 58.2% of people with type 2 diabetes receive all eight routine care processes, and completion varies by more than thirty percentage points between integrated care boards. Reduced completion is associated with higher mortality. Community pharmacies offer an accessible setting in which this gap might be narrowed. This paper presents a service-design case study for Southampton, a city whose recorded diabetes prevalence (6.2%) sits below the national average yet whose ratio of diabetes-related complications exceeds it. Publicly available data from the National Diabetes Audit, the national diabetes profile and the Southampton Data Observatory are used to characterise local need; a community pharmacy diabetes review service is then specified against the nine care processes defined by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence; and its costs and potential impact are estimated from the service specification and from published intervention effects. The projected model indicates that a structured pharmacy-delivered review, costed at approximately £45 per patient, could improve care-process completion; published per-patient complication savings suggest a plausible cost benefit, although confirming a local net saving would require data on the eligible population and uptake. The paper sets out the assumptions and limitations of this projection and the evidence that a local pilot would need to confirm it.