Your questions, answered.

A specials head office for community pharmacies. We run the whole operation around your specials — sourcing, compliance, reimbursement and the admin — on your side, and tied to no manufacturer. You say yes to the patient; we handle everything behind it.

We make nothing, and we're tied to no lab — which is exactly why we can work only for the pharmacy. We bring members the specials they need through MHRA-licensed routes, and run the head-office operation around them.

We're launching soon. You can reserve a founding place now — non-binding, nothing to pay — and you'll be first in line, on the best terms we'll ever offer, when we open.

Not a thing — that's the whole idea of founding. Reserving your place is free, costs you nothing, and ties you to nothing. There's no minimum spend to meet, no thresholds to chase and no penalties — ever. You're just letting us know you'd like to be one of the first, so we hold your place for you. No payment, no contract, no catch — just a head start.

It isn't binding at all. You sign a short letter of intent — a simple, friendly note that says you're interested in joining as a founder when we launch. It commits you to nothing, and you can change your mind any time before launch, for any reason. It's there only so we can hold your place and keep you near the front of the queue.

Nothing financial, and nothing locked-in. When we launch, we'll come to you first and show you exactly what's on the table — and then you decide whether to join. Being a founder simply means you're at the front of the queue, on the best terms we'll ever offer. You don't promise us anything until you've seen the full picture and decided it's right for you.

Things no one who joins after launch can ever get: 30% off your membership fee for life, six months of the full service free, area primacy in our directory, a real say in how BritUn is built, and the founding badge. Once we launch, there are members — but never founders again. It's a one-time invitation, and these are one-time rewards.

It's the opposite of a trial. A trial hides the price, then starts charging your card the moment it ends. With BritUn there's no card to hand over, nothing to remember to cancel, and no surprise bill — you simply get the complete service, free, for six months from the day we launch. It's a genuine head start while we earn your trust, not a countdown to a charge.

It means area primacy in our directory. When patients, carers, prescribers or care homes search for a Specials Ready pharmacy near them, founders are shown at the top for their area — ahead of any pharmacy that joins later. Among founders, your position is set simply by who reserved first: the earlier you found, the higher you stand at home. We judge each local area fairly and sensibly, based on the pharmacies around you, so that being first means something real wherever you are — and we use that judgement to be fair to our founders, never to disadvantage them.

Directly, and genuinely. Founders tell us which services matter most, what we should build first, and how the pricing and tiers should work — and we build around what we hear. You're not buying something finished off the shelf; you're helping decide what it becomes. The pharmacies who found BritUn shape the BritUn that everyone else later joins.

The badge marks you publicly as one of the original Specials Ready pharmacies — a clear signal to patients, carers, prescribers and care homes that you were first to take specials seriously and do them properly. It's a mark of trust you can show in your window and online, and one no later member can ever hold. Locally, being known as the specials pharmacy is exactly what wins the referrals and the care-home work.

Because founding is a genuine, one-time invitation — not an offer that's always open. Keeping the places limited is what makes it mean something: it keeps founding fair, keeps your rewards valuable, and means founders really are the select first cohort. If everyone could be a founder forever, being one would count for nothing.

For fairness — nothing more. We group founding places by specials volume for one reason: to make sure founding is shared fairly across every size of pharmacy, instead of the largest pharmacies quietly taking every place. To us, a pharmacy doing two specials a month matters as much as one doing thirty — the founder benefits are identical whichever group you're in. The bands only decide how many founders stand beside you, never how much you're worth to us.

Yes — and you should. Founding isn't limited to one pharmacy per area, so if places remain, you're very welcome to join, with the full founder benefits: 30% off for life, six months free, a voice in the build, and the founding badge. Area primacy works by reservation order — so if your neighbour reserved before you, they'll sit just above you locally, and reserving now puts you ahead of everyone who comes later. The sooner you found, the higher you stand — so it's worth not waiting.

None at all. There's no lock-in and no exit penalty — if BritUn ever stops being right for you, you're free to leave. We'd far rather earn your membership every month than tie you into it. Founding gives you our best possible terms; it never traps you in them.

Yes — the complete service, not a cut-down version, free for six months from launch, with no invoice and nothing to pay. It's the founder's head start, and it's one of the promises we put in writing in your membership agreement, so you're never left in any doubt.

BritUn is priced simply — per special, so the cost always tracks your real volume — and the final pricing is being shaped together with our founders. Whatever it settles at, founders keep 30% off it for life, and our aim, through pooled buying, is that the medicine itself costs you no more than it does today. We'd much rather walk you through the numbers for your own pharmacy than print a figure that doesn't fit it — so when we talk, you'll see exactly what it means for you.

We run the whole specials operation around your counter — the part a chain's head office does. We source the special; we tell you exactly how and what to endorse — the right endorsement, ready to use on every order, so the claim is right first time; we check you were paid what you're owed and help defend any clawback; we keep your records inspection-ready; and we bring you new specials custom. You say yes to the patient; we handle everything behind it. One service, one person to call.

Here's the honest difference. Wholesaler-owned or wholesaler-leaning buying groups price you on your own volume — so the smaller you are, the worse your price — and most impose a minimum spend, with penalties if you miss it. They call it group buying, but a small pharmacy doesn't really get the group's price; it gets its own. BritUn is different on both counts: we pool everyone's volume so even the smallest member buys with the whole group's strength behind them, and there's no minimum spend and no penalties. We're also different from NHS Collaborative Procurement Organisations (CPOs), which aggregate buying for NHS organisations such as hospital trusts — BritUn aggregates for independent community pharmacies, the group nobody else pools for. And the bigger difference of all: the others get you a price and hand you back the work. We run the operation.

That's the question we want you to ask — so we built a calculator to answer it with your own numbers. But here's how it's designed to pay for itself, department by department:

• Buying — a better price on every special, through pooled buying you couldn't reach alone.
• Reimbursement — we capture the endorsement fees you're currently missing, and a single recovered clawback can be worth more than a whole month's membership on its own.
• Cash flow — extended payment terms, so you pay closer to when the NHSBSA actually pays you, instead of being out of pocket while you wait.
• Compliance — hours of admin off your hands, and the records ready if an inspector ever asks.
• Growth — new specials custom, care-home work and referrals that simply weren't coming before.

Low-volume pharmacies have a specific set of problems, and BritUn is built for them. On your own, a few specials a month gets you the worst price and often a wholesaler minimum spend you struggle to meet. As a member, your handful joins hundreds of others, so you finally buy with the strength of the whole pool — better margins on the specials you do dispense, with no minimum spend and no penalties. On top of that you get a real growth path — new specials custom and referrals that reach more patients — and the admin, compliance and cash-flow support that makes saying yes easy. It's the one place being small stops counting against you.

Plenty — because volume brings its own problems. More specials means more endorsing, more records and more clawback exposure to manage, and more cash tied up waiting on reimbursement. BritUn takes that weight: the admin handled, the records kept inspection-ready, the reimbursement captured and protected, and extended payment terms to ease the cash-flow drag. And on price, pooling adds your volume to the whole group's, so you buy on terms your numbers alone wouldn't reach — better than you pay now, not worse. You gain on relief and on price.

Everyone wins, together — that's the point of true pooling. The smallest members gain the buying power and reach they could never get alone; the largest gain relief at scale and a price their own volume couldn't reach; and because we pool everyone's volume into one strong order, the whole group buys better than any member would on their own. No member is ever worse off for being part of it, and no member is treated as worth less for being smaller. Together, our members are bigger than any of them.

You're never locked in. Use us for everything, or start with the specials where you most want the help — it's your pharmacy and your call. Most members find that once the hassle's gone, they bring more of their specials to us simply because it's easier. But there's no minimum, no exclusivity, and no pressure.

No — and there's nothing new to learn. You don't need to master some new sci-fi ordering portal or change how you work. When you have a special to dispense, you simply email us the prescriber's requirements and we take it from there — sourcing it, confirming it, and sending you back an order confirmation with the expected delivery date. We fit around how you already work, which is exactly why getting started takes almost none of your time.

Keep them — there's no need to switch, and no exclusivity. The one thing to know is that BritUn's head-office service — the endorsing, reimbursement, clawback support, records and growth — runs on the specials you order through us; it doesn't cover specials you've procured elsewhere. So you can bring us a special whenever it suits you and keep using your own supplier the rest of the time, and the orders you place with us come fully serviced. Many members start by sending us the specials where they most want the help, and use us for more once they see how it works. Use us as much, or as little, as you like.

We're genuinely setting the final pricing together with our founders — so it wouldn't be right to carve it in stone before they've had their say. What we can promise now is fixed: founders get 30% off for life, six months free, and the aim, through pooled buying, is that the medicine itself costs you no more than it does today. The exact figure, we'll show you plainly for your own pharmacy.

Our aim is to bring your price down through pooled buying — adding your volume to hundreds of other members, not leaving you on your own volume the way a wholesaler or buying group does. A fixed-price basket covering most tariff specials will show you the price up front, so you can compare against what you pay today and decide before you order — no guesswork.

For the head office — the work, not the medicine. The fee covers running your whole specials operation: the sourcing, the endorsing, the reimbursement checks, the clawback evidence, the records, the growth — and extended payment terms, so you can pay closer to when the NHSBSA actually pays you, instead of being out of pocket while you wait. It's designed to pay for itself — the fees we help you capture and the clawbacks we help you protect often cover it on their own, with everything else on top. The calculator shows you that maths for your own numbers.

Less so with BritUn. One of the quiet costs of specials is paying for them long before the NHSBSA pays you back. Our extended payment terms are built to ease exactly that — letting you pay closer to when you're actually reimbursed, so specials stop being a drain on your cash flow while you wait. For a lot of pharmacies, that breathing room matters as much as the price itself.

No. The 30% founding discount is for life — it applies to whatever the price is, for as long as you're a member. It's not an introductory rate that quietly drops off after a year; it's a permanent thank-you for founding BritUn. (We review the underlying price over time, as any business does — but your 30% off it never goes away.)

First, there's nothing to afford to become a founder — reserving your place is completely free, with nothing to pay and no commitment. Beyond that, start with the calculator before you decide anything: most pharmacies are surprised to find specials are already costing them more, in lost fees and time, than BritUn would. The service is built to pay for itself, and founders get six months entirely free to feel that before anything is due. If money's tight, that six-month head start is exactly the breathing room to let the service prove itself first.

Yes — properly is the whole point. Every special is sourced through MHRA-licensed routes, from suppliers holding the appropriate authorisation, and comes with the documentation you need: a certificate (of Conformity or Analysis) for every order, the agreed specification confirmed in writing, and full traceability. It's exactly the assurance you'd want before accepting a special — sourced, papered and traceable, every time.

That's one of the biggest reasons members value us. We keep your specials records inspection-ready as a matter of course — the certificates, the traceability, the no-licensed-alternative evidence — organised and to hand, not scattered across emails and drawers. So if an inspector asks, you're reaching for a tidy, complete record instead of scrambling.

We keep your specials records for the full period you need them — a seven-year digital vault — and they're yours to reach any time. Nothing's locked away; you can get to your own records whenever you need them, whether that's for an inspection, a query, or your own peace of mind.

Securely, and always available to you. Your specials records and documents are kept in your seven-year digital vault, hosted in the cloud so you can reach them any time you need them. Everything is regularly backed up across secure, UK-based servers, so your records are protected and recoverable — never sitting in a single drawer or on one machine that could fail.

Yes — our reimbursement support is handled by trained, competent people who do this work day in, day out, and we document that training so it's never in question. To be clear and honest: specials endorsement admin isn't a regulated profession with a licence, so we'd never dress it up as something it isn't — but it is work that rewards real expertise and care, and that's exactly what we bring. You always stay the front line to the NHSBSA as the NHS's pharmacy contractor; we do the legwork to a high standard behind you. And because prevention beats cure, our focus is getting it right first time — far better than having a claim referred back and spending time putting it right.

We never sell or share your personal information, or your pharmacy's — full stop. We use it only to run your service and to stay in touch with you, and it's protected under UK data protection law. We do learn from the overall, anonymised picture across our members — trends and patterns with no one identifiable in them — to make BritUn better and stronger for everyone. But your identifiable information is yours, kept separate, and never for sale.

Yes. Your information is held securely, used only for the purposes you'd expect, and never passed to third parties to sell to you. We're registered with the ICO and bound by UK data protection law, and we've written our privacy policy in plain English so you can see exactly how your information is handled — no surprises.

Use the postcode search on our Directory page and it will show Specials Ready pharmacies in your area. We're launching soon, so the network is still growing — if you don't find one nearby just yet, do check back, and in the meantime your usual pharmacy or prescriber can help you with specials.

A special is a medicine that's made or supplied to meet a need a standard, licensed medicine can't — for example a liquid instead of a tablet, a different strength, or a version without an ingredient someone can't have. They exist for people who can't take their medicine the usual way, so that they're not left without it.

Specials aren't something you request yourself — they're decided by your doctor or prescriber, who'll consider one when they judge that a licensed medicine won't meet your clinical needs. If you think you're struggling to take a medicine the usual way, the right step is to talk to your prescriber or pharmacist; they'll decide what's appropriate for you.

Most medicines are made in large batches in standard forms and strengths, because that suits most people. When someone needs something outside that — a particular form, strength or ingredient — it isn't held ready on a shelf; it has to be specially made or sourced to meet that specific clinical need. That's normal, and it's exactly what a Specials Ready pharmacy is set up to handle.

Specials are prescribed when a clinician decides they're the right option for a patient, and a Specials Ready pharmacy sources them through proper, licensed, quality-assured routes, with documentation and safety checks for every supply. As with any medicine, your prescriber and pharmacist are the right people to talk to about what's suitable for you — they're there to make sure it's safe and right for your situation.

Yes — that's exactly who the Specials Ready directory is for. It helps you find a local pharmacy set up to source specials through licensed routes, supply them dependably and on time, and keep the documentation and continuity that inspections expect. Prescribers can refer with confidence; care-home managers can find a pharmacy equipped for reliable, gap-free supply and inspection-ready records. Use the postcode search on our Directory page, or contact us directly and we'll help.