Christmas Day 2022: Updating pharmacy opening hours on NHS Profile Manager

NHS England has confirmed that all community pharmacy Directory of Service (DoS) and NHS website profiles will automatically be set to show as closed on Sunday 25th December 2022 (Christmas Day).

It is important that your profile information is correct so that NHS staff, patients and the public can access accurate contact information, opening times and services. PSNC, NHS Digital and NHS England have jointly supported an automatic update to ease the process for community pharmacy contractors, and to ensure accurate information is contained in the DoS and NHS website systems.

What you need to do

If your pharmacy will be open on Sunday 25th December (Christmas Day), please update NHS Profile Manager in the ‘Temporary changes to opening times’ section, to indicate the hours that your pharmacy will be open. If you do not do this, your pharmacy will show as ‘Closed’ on Sunday 25th December.

If your pharmacy will be closed on Sunday 25th December, you do not need to do anything. Your pharmacy’s DoS and NHS Website entries will automatically be changed to show the pharmacy is closed on the day. You do not need to do this yourself.

If you have already made a temporary change to your standard opening times for Sunday 25th December, whether that is to set your pharmacy profile as open or closed, you do not need to repeat this action. NHS Digital will only be setting profiles to ‘closed’ for those who have not made any changes.

Terms of service requirement

Contractors are reminded of the Terms of Service requirement to ensure that they verify and, where necessary, update the information contained in their NHS website profile and their DoS profile at least once each quarter* of the financial year. For the current financial quarter, the deadline for completing this is 31st December 2022.

Even if no changes have been made during the financial quarter, contractors must still verify this information using NHS Profile Manager.

To update your profile, please follow the below steps:

  1. Register for the new NHS Profile Manager with your personal NHSmail address if you haven’t already. You’ll need NHSmail to use NHS Profile Manager. If NHSmail related support is required please refer to guidance at the bottom of this article. If you have already registered then proceed to update your NHS Profile Manager pharmacy profile now.
  2. Check you can access NHS Profile Manager and your pharmacy profile.
  3. Check that your opening times, contact information and services information are up to date for each profile.

Top tip

  • Set a diary reminder for that start of each financial quarter to go into NHS Profile Manager and validate each module.

Further information

*Note: The financial quarters are 1st April to 30th June; 1st July to 30th September; 1st October to 31st December; and 1st January to 31st March.