Patient contact timing has a bigger impact on NMS conversion than almost anything else. Here’s what we’ve seen across thousands of consultations, why it works, and how to build the 72-hour rule into your branch workflow.
Most pharmacies treat the NMS first contact as something they get to when they have time. The dispense happens, the consent is captured, and the patient gets added to a list that someone is supposed to work through later that week. Sometimes that week becomes two.
By the time the call goes out, the prescription has been filled, the patient has settled into a routine, and any uncertainty about the medicine has either been resolved on its own or hardened into a problem the call won’t easily fix.
The single biggest lever in NMS isn’t which pharmacist makes the call. It’s when the call happens.
The 72-hour rule: pharmacies that make their first NMS contact within 72 hours of the dispense see materially higher completion rates than pharmacies that wait longer. The longer the gap, the harder the conversion gets.
Why 72 hours matters
Three things shift in the first three days after a new prescription, and all of them work in your favour if you call early.
The medicine is still a question, not a habit
In the first few days, the patient is still working out how the medicine fits into their day. They’ve had a side effect they weren’t expecting, or they’re unsure about timing, or they’re second-guessing whether to take it at all. That’s exactly the moment NMS is designed for. A week in, they’ve either solved it themselves — often by stopping — or it’s baked into a routine you can’t easily change.
Recall is sharp
Patients who get the call within 72 hours can actually answer the questions. They remember what was said when they collected the prescription. They remember the early concerns. By day ten, the conversation gets vague and surface-level, which makes the consultation less useful and harder to document.
The expectation has been set
If your branch tells the patient at handover that they’ll get a follow-up call from a pharmacist within a few days, and that call comes when promised, completion rates jump. When the call lands two weeks later, the patient often doesn’t remember consenting to it and is more likely to decline.
Where this typically goes wrong
Almost every group we’ve worked with has the same failure mode: the eligible patient list grows faster than the team can work through it, so the oldest entries get older. Once a patient has been on the list for more than a week, they’re statistically much less likely to ever complete — but the workflow keeps treating them the same as the patient who was added yesterday.
The fix isn’t more capacity. It’s ordering.
“The single biggest lever in NMS isn’t which pharmacist makes the call. It’s when the call happens.”
How to build the 72-hour rule into your workflow
1. Sort by age, not alphabet
Whatever your team uses to work through the NMS list, the default sort should be the date the patient became eligible — oldest first within the 72-hour window, then the rest. If your team is calling patients in the order they appear on a list that’s sorted by surname, you’re leaving completions on the table.
2. Set a daily 72-hour target, not a monthly one
Monthly completion targets hide the timing problem. A pharmacy can hit its monthly target by calling patients on day fourteen and still see worse outcomes than a pharmacy that hits the same target by calling on day two. Track the percentage of consultations completed within 72 hours, branch by branch. That’s the metric that actually moves the needle.
3. Make the handover promise explicit
At dispense, train the team to say something like: “You’ll get a call from a pharmacist in the next couple of days about your new medicine — it’s a free NHS service to make sure everything’s working for you.” That single sentence sets the expectation, increases consent quality, and makes the follow-up call land as something the patient was waiting for, not something they’d forgotten about.
4. Automate the queue, not the conversation
The point of putting NMS into a proper workflow tool isn’t to take the human out of the consultation — it’s to take the admin out of working out who to call next. The pharmacist’s time should go into the conversation, not into deciding whose name to dial. If your team is hunting through PMR exports to find the next eligible patient, the timing problem will never go away.
The bigger picture
NMS is a margin business. The fee per consultation is fixed, so the only way to make the service materially more valuable is to complete more of them. And the gap between a pharmacy that does NMS well and one that doesn’t isn’t about pharmacist quality — it’s almost always about timing and queue management.
In a year where the contract is uncertain and pharmacy margins are under more pressure than they have been in a decade, the 72-hour rule is one of the few operational levers that’s entirely within your control. It costs nothing to implement. It’s available to every pharmacy on day one.
If your group hasn’t looked at how long it currently takes to make first contact — measured properly, branch by branch — that’s the audit worth doing this month.
How Encon Pharma helps
The 72-hour rule is the kind of thing every pharmacy group agrees with in principle and few manage in practice — because the queue, the sorting, and the timing measurement aren’t built into most tools.
We built our platform around it. NMS lists are sorted by eligibility age automatically, the dialler works through patients in the right order, and contact timing is tracked branch-by-branch so you can see exactly where the bottleneck is.
If you’d like to see what your group’s first-contact timing looks like today, book a demo and we’ll walk you through it.