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Pick My Pharmacy

Free UK pharmacy comparison. Ratings cannot be bought —how we make money· methodology

Our Methodology

Pick My Pharmacy is an independent comparison service operated by Elite Digital AI Solutions Ltd. We are a directory — not a pharmacy — and we are not GPhC-registered ourselves; we compare GPhC-registered providers. This page explains exactly where our data comes from, how the Pharmacy Score and rankings work, how we make money, and how to correct something we've got wrong. Ratings and rankings are our editorial opinion, formed using the process below — they are not medical advice and not a guarantee of any pharmacy's service.

Where listings come from

Pharmacies appear on Pick My Pharmacy through two routes, and every profile states which applies:

Curated commercial listings — pharmacies we have reviewed editorially, including pharmacies that pay for listing tiers or referral partnerships. These profiles carry service, pricing, and review data.

Register imports — pharmacies added from public registers: the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) premises register and the NHS ODS dataset of community pharmacies. These profiles show factual register data — premises registration number, registered address, register status — and are labelled with their data source and snapshot date. Register-imported pharmacies start unrated, with no pricing, and gain those fields only after verification. Inclusion from a public register is free and does not imply any relationship with us.

GPhC premises data. We import from the quarterly public “Registered Premises List” published onpharmacyregulation.org/registers(snapshot date shown on each profile). We attribute the GPhC as the source and link patients back to the live register to verify. The GPhC also offers a separate paid data-subscription service with its own licence (validation / non-commercial research). Commercial directory reuse of the free quarterly list is not the same product — we treat ongoing licence confirmation with the GPhC (or counsel) as an operator responsibility, and we do not redistribute the raw XLSX download.

NHS ODS data. English community-pharmacy records may also be enriched from the NHS Organisation Data Service (ORD API). ODS is public-sector open data; we use organisation name, ODS code, address, and contact fields only, and never invent GPhC numbers from ODS.

Verification and safety gates

We verify each listing against the GPhC premises register — the authoritative record of registered pharmacies in Great Britain — and show the GPhC premises number and the superintendent pharmacist when they are on file, with a link to pharmacyregulation.orgso you can check the current entry yourself. For online prescribing services in England we also record the provider's CQC rating, because the CQC regulates the prescriber even though the GPhC regulates the pharmacy.

Before any scoring happens, three hard gates apply:

Unregistered means unlisted. A premises we cannot match to the GPhC register is never listed. There is no score low enough for an unregistered seller of medicines — it simply does not appear.

Lapsed registration suppresses the score. If our latest register snapshot shows a premises as anything other than registered, we withhold the score entirely and show a prominent warning instead, with the snapshot date and a direction to verify current status on the official register.

A CQC "inadequate" rating suppresses the score. Where a linked online prescribing service holds the CQC's lowest rating, we withhold the pharmacy's score and flag it rather than let strong reviews average away a regulator's enforcement-level finding.

Verification is point-in-time — registrations change — so register-derived data carries a freshness stamp on the profile, and you should always confirm current status on the official register before obtaining medicines, especially from an online pharmacy.

The Pharmacy Score: four pillars

Each pharmacy's score out of 100 is a weighted blend of four pillar scores, every one computed transparently from fields shown on the profile — never from hidden or invented data. Where a pillar has no data (for example, no attributed reviews yet), its weight is redistributed across the remaining pillars — absence of data is not treated as evidence of poor service.

Safety & regulation (35%) — the heaviest pillar by design.GPhC premises registration and a named superintendent pharmacist form the baseline. On top of that we use the pharmacy's latest published GPhC inspection outcome frominspections.pharmacyregulation.org: "all standards met" scores fully (with a small uplift for published best-practice findings), while "standards not all met" is penalised heavily until the published improvement action plan is complete. Where a linked online prescribing service holds a CQC rating, that rating is blended in. Because the regulator's verdict matters more than anything else we measure, a pharmacy with no published inspection on filehas its total score capped at 75/100 — clearly labelled — so an uninspected website can never outrank an inspected, compliant pharmacy on reviews alone.

Patient experience (25%). When review scores appear, they come from attributed third-party sources only (for example NHS.uk patient ratings, Trustpilot, or Google), shown with their source and count — we do not scrape or republish review text. We weight the average for sample size: a pharmacy's score is statistically pulled toward the peer average until it has enough reviews to stand on its own. Where we have no reliable review data (the default for register imports today), the pharmacy shows "Not yet rated" — we never invent a score, and we do not write, commission, or count reviews we cannot attribute to a source.

Services & access (20%). What the pharmacy actually offers and how easy it is to use: breadth of NHS services (Pharmacy First, flu vaccination, New Medicine Service, contraception, blood pressure checks), private services, extended or 100-hour opening, a private consultation room, wheelchair access, NHS App repeat ordering, and delivery. This is what differentiates pharmacies day-to-day, and it is scored from the same service and amenity fields shown on the profile.

Price & transparency (20%). Two halves: whether the pharmacy publishes indicative prices for private services at all (openness), and how its published prices compare with the average for pharmacies of the same type (value). NHS services are never part of this score — the NHS prescription charge is fixed at £9.90 per item in England and prescriptions are free in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, so there is nothing to compare — and we never rank pharmacies on the price of prescription-only medicines.

Our fixed rules on top of those pillars:

No Pay-for-Score. No pharmacy can pay to obtain, raise, or protect a rating, and no pharmacy can pay to suppress a low one. Advertising status is invisible to the rating process.

No Fabricated Reviews. Reviews are optional data; absence is shown as "Not yet rated".

Opinion, honestly labelled. Ratings summarise the evidence available to us at review time. They are subjective editorial judgements, they can lag reality, and they are not a prediction or warranty of the service you will receive.

How rankings and matching work

Directory default order interleaves brands (round-robin) so chains and independents mix; users can re-sort. The comparison wizard scores pharmacies on service overlap, location fit, budget alignment (for private services), credentials, and review quality. Paid tiers buy labelled visibility — "Featured" placement and inclusion as a referral partner — and never change a pharmacy's rating or overrule poor service fit in match results. Anywhere placement was paid for, the card says so.

Pricing data

Prices shown are indicative "from" prices for private services only, based on published pharmacy price lists and our market research — they are not quotes, and pharmacies change prices without telling us. Always confirm the price directly before booking. Where a pharmacy has not supplied pricing, we show "Contact" rather than an estimate. NHS services are free or carry the fixed statutory charge — we never imply the NHS prescription charge varies by pharmacy.

We Are Not a Pharmacy

Nothing on this site is medical advice, and we never advertise prescription-only medicines — a consultation with a prescriber is always required before any prescription-only medicine can be supplied. If you need clinical advice, speak to a pharmacist or your GP. For urgent medical help call NHS 111, or 999 in an emergency.

How we make money

Pick My Pharmacy earns revenue from optional paid listing tiers, referral partnerships, and pay-per-lead fees paid by pharmacies. Comparison is free for patients. Paid status is disclosed on profiles and listing cards. We are not affiliated with the GPhC, the NHS, the MHRA, or the CQC.

Affiliate and referral compliance

Some online pharmacies run affiliate programmes (for example MedExpress pays a flat £40 CPA on approved weight-loss referrals via AWIN). When we participate:

  • Outbound referral links use rel="sponsored" and are labelled “Ad – Affiliate”.
  • We do not advertise Prescription Only Medicines (POMs) to the public in affiliate creatives — no drug names such as Mounjaro or Wegovy, no indirect references (“jabs”, “pens”, “weight-loss injections”, dose strengths), no “get a prescription” claims, no guaranteed-results or timeline claims, and no injection imagery — in line with the MHRA Blue Guide and each programme’s rules.
  • Editorial comparison pages may discuss medicines by name for patient information; paid referral CTAs point to the pharmacy’s clinical service (for example a weight-loss service landing page), not a POM product URL.
  • Affiliate discount codes are never shown alongside supplier price comparisons or price-matching discussion — coded referrals appear only on standalone service-level placements, in line with programme terms.
  • We never publish or share an affiliate discount code until the programme has given written approval.
  • Referral status never changes ratings, match scores, or the order providers appear in comparisons.

Corrections and complaints

If you run a pharmacy and your listing is inaccurate — or you'd like a register-imported listing updated, claimed, or removed — email hello@pickmypharmacy.co.ukwith the pharmacy name and GPhC premises number, or use the claim your listing page. We aim to respond within five working days and to correct verified factual errors promptly. Users can challenge any rating or data point the same way; where we agree, we fix it and note material corrections on the profile.

Updates and data freshness

Pharmacy data is reviewed quarterly, private-service pricing benchmarks annually, and GPhC register and inspection snapshots are refreshed periodically — each profile shows the snapshot date its register data comes from. NHS charges are updated when NHSBSA publishes new rates (the England prescription charge is £9.90 per item, frozen for 2026/27). Last methodology review: July 2026.