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Making the Right Choice: Outsourced vs In-House Clinical Pharmacy Services

2nd June 2025

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When building a clinical pharmacy team, PCNs, GP practices, and Federations must decide between direct hires or partnering with an external specialist. In-house teams offer complete control but come with significant burdens in terms of recruitment, retention, and training. Outsourcing to a managed provider delivers ready-to-go clinical support, reduced administrative tasks, lower risk, contingency planning, and improved data for KPI tracking. For many networks, a managed clinical pharmacy support model, such as Core Prescribing Solutions, offers scalable and flexible workforce coverage, particularly in the face of ARRS pressures, funding constraints, and long-term condition management.

What Does In-House Clinical Pharmacy Involve?
Outsourcing Clinical Pharmacy Services: What to Expect
Key Differences: Outsourcing vs In-House
The ARRS Context: Why This Decision Matters Now

Key Takeaways:

Outsourcing clinical pharmacy services offers faster deployment, reduced admin, helps unlock further value, plus time saved and greater flexibility for PCNs.
In-house clinical pharmacy teams require significant investment in supervision, HR, and ongoing training.
Core Prescribing Solutions provides clinical pharmacy support for PCNs through a managed service model that ensures consistent delivery, governance, integration and continuous value creation.

What Does In-House Clinical Pharmacy Involve?

Running an in-house clinical pharmacy model means the PCN, GP Federation or practice directly recruits, employs, and manages its own clinical pharmacists and pharmacy technicians. This gives full control over staffing and day-to-day integration, but it also brings significant HR, training, and governance responsibilities.

Key elements include:

Full responsibility for clinical pharmacist recruitment, onboarding, and retention.
Managing contracts, payroll, appraisals, annual leave, and sickness cover.
Providing appropriate clinical supervision, especially for newly qualified or non-independent prescribers.
Ensuring pharmacists receive ongoing CPD and are aligned with PCN objectives.
Handling performance management, audit governance, and operational delivery internally.

For networks still recruiting clinical pharmacists in primary care, the in-house route requires dedicated leadership and significant investment in time, long-term workforce planning, and the ability to absorb service gaps when staff are absent or leave.

Outsourcing Clinical Pharmacy Services: What to Expect

With outsourcing clinical pharmacy services, a PCN, GP Federation or practice partners with an external clinical pharmacist provider to deliver ready-to-go workforce support. This model removes the burden of recruitment, HR, and clinical supervision, while still integrating clinical pharmacists into your team and services.

A typical outsourced service includes:

Supply of trained, experienced outsourced clinical pharmacists, ready to deliver patient-facing services.
Full governance clinical oversight is provided by the service partner.
Flexible contracts based on local need, from part-time practice cover to fully scaled PCN support.
Built-in service delivery: SMRs, QOF support, audits, discharge reconciliation, long-term condition clinics alongside specialised data reports.
Performance tracking, reporting, and escalation are part of the service, not by the PCN.
Minimal estate impact many models include hybrid or remote working, which is growing in demand.

Our model ensures practices and networks get consistent, high-quality clinical support without the risks or overheads of building and managing teams internally.

Key Differences: Outsourcing vs In-House

When deciding between internal recruitment and outsourcing, PCNs need to weigh operational, clinical, and workforce factors.

Below is a practical comparison to support that decision:

Category	In-House Pharmacy Teams	Outsourced Pharmacy Services
Staffing & Control	Full control over hiring and integration	Rapid access to experienced clinical pharmacists and pharmacy technicians
Supervision & Oversight	Internal oversight of daily activities High responsibility for supervision and service continuity	Supervision, training, and service delivery alongside monitoring and reporting of KPIs, QOF, SMRs and key metrics
Admin & HR Burden	HR, payroll, appraisals, and sickness cover fall on the PCN or practice	No internal HR/admin burden
Training & Support	Requires investment of capital and time in training, performance management, and ongoing development	Training, CPD, and governance handled by provider
Flexibility	Fixed capacity; scaling requires new hires or restructures	Greater flexibility to scale services up/down based on need due to economies of scale and existing clinical workfoce of provider
Risk & Continuity	Recruitment delays and staff turnover pose delivery risks	Lower long-term risk with provider-managed cover (where applicable) and continuity
Monitoring & Delivery	Varies depending on internal structure and resources	Built-in performance reporting, SMR delivery, and escalation mechanisms

“The choice between in-house and outsourced clinical pharmacy teams comes down to what your practice needs most: control or flexibility. For many PCNs facing recruitment delays and workforce pressures, outsourcing provides an immediate, scalable solution with built-in clinical oversight helping deliver on NHS targets without the internal management burden.“

Adeem Azhar: Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Core Prescribing Solutions

The ARRS Context: Why This Decision Matters Now

The Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS) remains the main route for funding clinical pharmacists and pharmacy technicians in general practice. However, while funding is available, many PCNs continue to struggle with delivering on their workforce plans due to recruitment delays, limited capacity and bandwidth, and high staff turnover. This is why choosing between in-house hires and a managed partner matters more than ever in 2024/2025.

Effective ARRS pharmacist support isn’t just about filling posts, it’s about delivering services safely, sustainably, and in line with NHS priorities. Without the right structure in place, ARRS-funded roles can fail to meet expectations.

Outsourcing can offer a ready-made pharmacy workforce solution for PCNs, especially where:

Clinical supervision is limited or inconsistent.
Internal recruitment has been slow or unsuccessful.
Existing clinical pharmacists and pharmacy technicians are unsupported or stretched.
SMR targets, QOF delivery, and long-term condition clinics are falling behind.
Specialist clinical support is needed ie specialised diabetes clinics.

Why PCNs Choose Core Prescribing Solutions Outsourced Model

At Core Prescribing Solutions, we provide fully managed clinical pharmacy support that aligns with the real pressures faced by PCNs, practices, and GP federations. Our team has delivered services nationwide, offering both flexibility and consistent results in high-demand environments.

As a trusted clinical pharmacist provider, we offer:

End-to-end onboarding and induction, including IT system access and clinical alignment.
Delivery of core services, including Structured Medication Reviews (SMRs), audits, and QOF support.
Scalable capacity, from practice-level delivery to full PCN or Federation implementation.
Full tech platform linking to EHR – 0 downtime = more clinical output.
Clinical supervision, CPD, and day-to-day oversight and regular reporting are built into our model.
Performance tracking, governance, and workforce resilience built around your population’s needs.

With our managed clinical pharmacy services, you gain immediate access to experienced clinical pharmacists and pharmacy technicians, supported by a leadership team with extensive NHS, clinical, and management experience to help you succeed. It’s why so many PCNs, Federations and Practices nationwide trust us to provide ongoing, high-quality clinical pharmacy support for PCNs without the staffing burden or delivery risk.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should we outsource our clinical pharmacists or hire in-house?

Both models have merit, but for many PCNs, outsourcing provides faster access to experienced support without the supervision, HR, and onboarding clinical burden that comes with an in-house clinical pharmacy team. An outsourced clinical pharmacist can deliver core services from day one, backed by structured oversight and flexibility to scale. The Core Prescribing Solutions approach is proven to help PCNs, practices and partners unlock continuous value, savings in time and money.

What’s included in an outsourced pharmacy service?

An outsourced service typically includes clinical compliance, structured onboarding, delivery of SMRs, support with audits and QOF, and regular reporting. However at Core Prescribing Solutions we create a bespoke service based on the individual needs of the practices, budgets and patients. A trusted provider offering clinical pharmacy support for PCNs will also handle training, governance, and ongoing workforce continuity to ensure safe, effective delivery.

Do outsourced pharmacists still integrate into the team?

Yes, a good outsourced clinical pharmacist works as part of your team day to day. While management and supervision are handled externally, they attend practice meetings, work alongside GPs and nurses, and contribute to service delivery as if they were in-house.