1/4/2023 0 Comments Sick face for facebook![]() So far, there appears little sign of a turnaround. A parliamentary research briefing on the future of community pharmacies this year suggested things have only worsened since, and in May the total number of pharmacies open stood at 11,118 across England, with 207 having closed since 2017. Official NHS figures showed that, last year, a spate of closures meant the number of community pharmacies in England hit their lowest level in six years, to fall to 11,636. More and more businesses have already started to collapse. Growing calls from the industry for support are hardly a surprise. The funding situation, Boots pharmacy director Anne Higgins says, “is not sustainable in the long term and, like the rest of the sector, we want to work with the government to address this”. “I’m hearing members say that they have put everything into their pharmacy to make sure that they’re providing healthcare in communities, particularly in areas of high deprivation, and then they're in a position where they have to sell their house to survive.”Įven larger businesses in the sector are becoming concerned. “It is heartbreaking for me,” says Hannbeck. Recruitment more broadly across these businesses is simply becoming tougher, with around nine in 10 pharmacies reporting staff shortages, forcing many business owners into longer hours. It means it is “difficult to reward our staff appropriately in the current environment". It’s just not reasonable."ĭwindling margins bring with it their own pressures, he says. “If I’d bought it, I’d be losing £20 a box on that one. Paul Mason, a superintendent pharmacist at Yorkshire group Lo’s Pharmacy, says he was looking for one item yesterday “and the cheapest price I could get the stock for was 20 times what the NHS drug tariff was listing”. Yet, this is becoming an increasingly tough task. The fees pharmacists get are going nowhere, but now, there’s higher utility bills, higher staff fees and higher drug costs.” The latter has proved a particular headache for pharmacists, who order in medicine supplies at costs which are, in theory, then reimbursed by the NHS. “We've been starved of appropriate funding since 2016,” says Dr Leyla Hannbeck, chief executive of the Association of Independent Multiple Pharmacies. For industry chiefs, the situation is becoming almost untenable. The Government has so far avoided making any adjustments to how much funding community pharmacies get for providing services, and keeping their doors open. That amount was already down £200m on 2016 levels, according to EY.īut now, more than half way through the five year deal, the shortfall looks even more significant, as inflationary pressures mount. In total, community pharmacies in England generate 90pc of their revenues from NHS contracts for those services, with the Government having agreed in 2019 to set the size of that funding pot at £2.6bn a year. ![]() It is an exasperation shared by many in the community pharmacy sector – an industry which is knitted into the UK's healthcare system and which is essentially reliant on funding from the NHS to then provide medicines and services for patients. “What is happening is we're facing a system that's just not working at all in our favour.” Strachan says the issue is that pharmacists are “just not getting the help we need to be able to do this job properly”. In fact, that's the kind of territory that pharmacists are in now.”Īll of which, he says, makes the current situation all the more frustrating. “She’d been told about an opiate withdrawal program and she was asking me what to do. One mother who came in to see him had had her children taken off her due to her use of cannabis. “I was seeing people back then who had potential melanomas and potential bowel cancers,” he says. ![]() ![]() Many in the community were reliant on Strachan and his team during the toughest days of lockdown. “We were there every single day, even when the virus was prevalent and people were dying.” “Our four pharmacies were the only point of call that was open,” says pharmacist Ian Strachan. For many people, during the Covid pandemic, Strachan Pharmacy became much more than just a place to pick up their next prescription. ![]()
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