EPS across care settings
Published on: 22nd November 2017 | Updated on: 4th September 2025
EPS was originally rolled out to GP practices. However, EPS continues to be expanded to urgent and other care settings.
The Electronic Prescription Service (EPS) is being rolled out across primary care in Wales.
As of June 2025:
- all seven pharmacy system suppliers with contracts in Wales support EPS;
- with the majority of pharmacies in Wales now enabled to receive electronic prescriptions; and
- 15% of GP practices in Wales able to send them.
Patients registered at any EPS enabled GP practice in Wales may choose to nominate your pharmacy. Likewise, patients registered at English GP practices may choose to alter their nomination to an EPS enabled pharmacy in Wales to dispense their prescription items. Should you receive a Welsh prescription you should check that the patient’s nomination is up-to-date.
In some cases, for example, if a patient has moved, there may be a historic nomination that is incorrect. If this happens, update the patient’s nomination to their chosen pharmacy to ensure future prescriptions are sent to the correct location, and return any misdirected prescriptions to the NHS Spine.
Welsh patients who choose to have their prescriptions filled at an English pharmacy near the border may be required to pay a prescription charge, unless they qualify for an exemption or hold a valid entitlement. In contrast, prescription charges do not apply within Wales.
Moving from paper to digital prescriptions transition makes prescribing and collecting medicines more convenient for everyone. While EPS is available across England and Wales, those working and living on the border will especially benefit from this service.
As always, each EPS user making changes to nomination settings, and each pharmacy team must ensure their nomination processes are in line with the EPS nomination principles.
NHS England has announced that the Electronic Prescription Service (EPS) has been fully extended to Detained Estate healthcare services in England
The staggered rollout has allowed prescribers working in prisons to issue EPS ‘To Take Out’ (TTO) and critical prescriptions electronically to community pharmacies, thereby removing the need for paper FP10 forms.
Most people are released from prison with a supply of their current medications, so they may only need to collect their EPS prescription after release. They are also likely to collect their prescription from a pharmacy far from the prison, as many people are detained far from their homes.
This development and the piloting were previously announced.
Free-of-charge 0015 HMP code for these prescriptions
An HM prison-issued FP10 or FP10MDA prescription issued to a person released from prison is exempt from NHS prescription charges. HMP prescriptions should have the exemption category 0015 HMP selected*.
*On some dispensing systems, this category is worded in a misleading way, for example, ‘patient does not have to pay a prescription charge’.
The prescriber address section of the prescription must include the initials ‘HMP’/ ‘YOI’ (Young Offenders Institution) to confirm that the prescription is exempt from charges. Please note: the prescriber address is required by law.
If so, the patient does not need to complete a signed declaration on the back of the form or Token. Exemption category 0015 should only be used for processing HMP prescriptions for people released from prison.
Some pharmacy teams have requested that their system supplier identify HMP prescriptions and set these to the exemption category 0015 by default, and to flag for pharmacy teams that these are HMP free-of-charge electronic prescriptions.
Detained estate prescribers have been asked to let patients know that they should highlight the exemption to the pharmacy because these will not be automatically exempted by the Real Time Exemption Checking (RTEC) system.
Handling these prescriptions
These prescriptions are expected to be relatively rare in community pharmacies; however, any pharmacy may receive one of these prescriptions.
According to the NHSBSA, there are currently around 6,000 of these types of FP10s issued annually by prisons. Still, the availability of EPS may influence future use of that route to supply medicines to people being discharged from prison. Health and justice statistics indicate that tens of thousands of people are released from prison each year.
Here are the key points for pharmacy teams to consider when handling these prescriptions:
Individual prescriber codes
Prescriber codes are not used within the detained estate.
Patient communications
Prescribers have been asked to communicate to patients about their electronic prescriptions and to inform them that they are entitled to free prescriptions.
Non-nominated prescriptions
These prescriptions might be non-nominated EPS prescriptions that need to be retrieved from the NHS Spine. Due to the uncertainty of where individuals will live after release, prescribers typically choose to issue non-nominated prescriptions instead of using one-off or standard nominated prescriptions.
You’ll need to search using the patient’s name, date of birth, and NHS number, when available.
Tokens
Some individuals may have a token or prescription barcode/number for their prescription, which was either provided to them by the prescriber or can be accessed via the NHS App or their online NHS account. However, many patients may not have a token due to difficulties faced by prison prescribers in providing this and because patients may not have access to phones or computers to download their EPS token to present it to the pharmacy. In such cases, the prescription will need to be located by the pharmacy team using patient information, such as their name, date of birth and the address of the prison from which they were released.
Medication changes
Prison prescribers may not be able to amend prescriptions post-release. Patients can be directed to register with a new GP or contact NHS 111 for any medication changes or duplicate prescriptions.
Remain aware of patients who may have seen a community GP without collecting their prison discharge medication.
Pharmacy queries for the prescriber
If a pharmacy needs to contact the prison prescriber, for example, with a prescription query, they should look up the prison contact details and then phone the main prison switchboard and ask to be connected to the healthcare team. These teams generally operate during core hours from 08:00 to 17:00, Monday to Friday, with some availability outside these hours.
Scope
The current EPS implementation for detained estates prescribers covers medication at the point of release and critical items where the usual supply of medicines can’t be supplied locally, and discharge medications upon release. Controlled drug instalment prescribing still requires the use of paper FP10 MDA forms.
Patient Sensitivity
Be mindful that patients may be sensitive about disclosing their detention. The Rehabilitation of Offenders Act protects individuals from unlawful disclosure of past convictions, particularly spent ones, so maintaining discretion and professional confidentiality is essential.
Support and escalations
If there is a technical issue or a concern with an EPS prescription, use the usual EPS escalation route factsheet to ensure a proper resolution.
Looking ahead
Future developments planned by NHS England’s Health and Justice and EPS teams include extending EPS to secure children’s homes through upcoming pilots, exploring enhanced discharge medicines supply arrangements with up to 28-day supplies for all releases, and a separate discovery project examining electronic transmission of internal prison prescriptions that currently require paper-based processes.
NHS England’s Health and Justice thanks pharmacy teams for their support of people released from detention, as it is vital for their successful reintegration and continued healthcare. This electronic system ensures they receive timely access to essential medications during this critical transition period, improving healthcare outcomes for these vulnerable individuals.
Benefits
This rollout improves access to urgent and necessary medicines for released patients by:
- Enabling the prescribing of discharge medicines in advance as part of release planning, resolving the issue of safely retaining a paper prescription.
- Streamlining the discharge medicines prescribing process, allowing for more remote prescribing and reducing reliance on on-site prescribers to issue paper FP10s.
- Replacing the need for dispensing discharge medicines that are often left behind or cannot be supplied before the patient leaves.
- Avoiding the need for patients to return to prison post-release to collect discharge medicines, which often remain uncollected.
- Addressing issues related to the destruction of paper FP10s if a detainee returns to custody after a court appearance, as EPS prescriptions can be digitally cancelled.
Further information
NHS England HJIS update (Sept 2025)
The Electronic Prescription Service (EPS) is currently available for sexual health clinics and the first such clinics have begun to use it.
Pharmacy teams should take into account of how to process the free-of-charge status for “Free Supply (FS)” prescriptions (see patient charges and FS factsheet) from clinics.
EPS is rolling out across some trusts, and this is anticipated to continue.
Following a successful pilot, NHS England’s Transformation Directorate including the EPS team rolled out the EPS to urgent care providers using the Advanced Adastra prescribing system from 2018. Integrated urgent care providers include: NHS 111, GP out of hours, Clinical Assessment Services (CAS), Walk-in Centres, Minor Injuries Units and Urgent Care Centres.
EPS is available within the following relevant prescribing systems:
- Advanced Adastra prescribing system
- IC24
- EMIS Web
- TPP systems
Prescribers with EPS can use EPS to prescribe medicines in the same way that GP practices do.
How does this work?
Prescribers identify a pharmacy that is open and accessible for the patient using similar processes to those used for paper FP10s.
EPS alone is unable to guarantee the pharmacy:
- will be made aware of the urgency of the prescription;
- has medication in stock; and
- has the ability to dispense the prescription.
Due to the nature of prescriptions issued in urgent care, prescribers have been advised to consider whether it is necessary to contact dispensers to notify them they are issuing an EPS prescription to advise it needs to be dispensed promptly.
The EPS system will use a type of ‘one-off nomination’ to send the prescription to the pharmacy that the patient has selected. This will not affect existing nominations for the patient’s ‘regular’ prescriptions.
The prescriptions will be downloaded by the pharmacy team’s PMR system in the normal way. Pharmacies that are open out of hours and that regularly receive paper prescriptions written by prescribers from urgent care providers may want to consider reviewing how frequently they download prescriptions from the central NHS Spine, so that any prescriptions sent by urgent care services are downloaded promptly. The prescription message will contain the contact details of the prescribing site in case there are any queries for the prescriber. The existing EPS dispense/claim message sending processes are unaffected.
You can use the prescription ID number to locate and download prescriptions manually if you would like to delay a full download of all EPS prescriptions in order to help you to manage your EPS prescription workload.
It is possible that a patient may present at a pharmacy different to the one originally selected by them and the urgent care prescriber. In this case, the pharmacist at the pharmacy where the patient has presented, should obtain the patient’s NHS number through a Personal Demographic Service search and use this with the Prescription ID (which may be obtained from the patient or from EPS Tracker) to manually download the prescription from the Spine, or contact the pharmacy originally selected by the urgent care prescriber. Patients may be given their prescription ID either verbally or via text message.
What happens if there is a problem using EPS for urgent care?
In the event of either a prescribing, dispensing or national system failure and the patient is not present to receive an FP10, the urgent care provider could send an FP10 prescription via NHSmail scanned attachment (ideally following up with a phone call) to the patient’s chosen pharmacy. This will initiate the emergency supply process, with the FP10 subsequently being posted to the pharmacy.
EPS has not yet rolled out to dentistry. The overall volume of forms prescribed by dentists is low, and EPS has not yet been tested within dentistry. If dentistry EPS is to be rolled out in the future, there will be some challenges to overcome – regulatory and technical.
National COVID-19 Clinical Assessment Service electronic prescriptions: From 1st September 2020, the COVID-19 Clinical Assessment Service (CCAS), hosted by the South Central Ambulance Service, added the functionality for GPs within the service to prescribe, using EPS. This was intended to improve the patient journey and allow the CCAS GPs to complete an episode of care. The scope of prescribing was for acute prescriptions only and was only to include controlled drug medicines where clinically appropriate. EPS prescriptions that came from the CCAS were not restricted to patients in the South East Region as the service manages patient enquiries from across England. Pharmacy teams were able to use the contact details on the EPS token to telephone the service to contact the prescriber in the event of queries.
The EPS team continues to work to make EPS an option for prescribers to use in extended access hubs, community, out of hours and urgent care settings.
Updates will be published by Community Pharmacy England and NHS England.
If there is a technical issue or a concern with an EPS prescription from a pilot or other setting use EPS escalation route factsheet to escalate the issue appropriately and ensure a proper resolution.
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For more information on this topic please email it@cpe.org.uk
