Chemists slam Sunak’s £645m pharmacies revolution

On the face of it, it seems that the government has finally taken action to solve the crisis that is putting our community pharmacies out of business in the High Street.

Last week, Amanda Pritchard, NHS England’s chief executive, stated that community pharmacists will receive an additional £645 million over the next two years to boost staff and resources.

Over the past six months, the Daily Mail’s Save Our Local Pharmacies campaign has shown how financial crises have closed hundreds of our vital independent community pharmacies in recent years, and thousands more will follow with extinction.

Their plight is due to a huge funding shortfall in the NHS contract with pharmacists, penalizing them financially every time they supply us with essential medicines.

At the same time, they also have to deal with sky-high overhead costs, such as personnel and energy bills.

So while the announcement of hundreds of millions in NHS cash may seem like a win, pharmacy leaders have told Good Health it isn’t.

This is because the new money for pharmacists is to provide additional services, rather than paying them properly for what they already do.

The £645 million is intended to fund England’s independent pharmacies to prescribe certain medicines, including antibiotics, and provide routine testing for the first time without the patient having to see a GP first.

The drugs that pharmacists can now prescribe are for seven common conditions: earache, sore throat, sinusitis, impetigo (a type of skin infection), shingles, infected insect bites, and urinary tract infections (in women). In addition, women can get contraceptive pills from the pharmacy without having to speak to a GP or practice nurse.

The new money also aims to double the number of blood pressure checks community pharmacists currently perform to 2.5 million per year.

However, this new money will not solve funding shortfalls that have forced 160 community pharmacies in England to close in the last two years alone, according to new figures from the NHS Business Services Authority.

In terms of driving, it’s like your car’s fuel gauge reads empty and you get a caravan to hitch up at the back.

That’s why Tim Gibbs, owner and manager of the Yarmouth Pharmacy on the Isle of Wight, was both surprised and disappointed by the news.

“I hadn’t heard about this money before NHS England’s announcement last week,” he told Good Health.

“There are no real details. There should be a process of consultation about where the money will go and how it will be spent, so until that is done we know very little.”

Good health first envisioned 58-year-old Tim in November last year when we launched the Save Our Local Pharmacies campaign. At the time, he had to work 85 hours a week to keep his business running.

Today, he’s still working 85-hour weeks — and he doesn’t see how the newly announced funds will help.

“I understand that the money will not be rolled out until the end of this year,” he says. “No matter when it comes, it won’t help my plight because it doesn’t address the crisis I and my fellow public pharmacists are facing.

“The crisis is that the basic payments we get for prescription drugs are insufficient to pay for the core work of what we do: prescribing essential medicines to people in our communities.

“The cost of all basic necessities has gone up, including the cost of the medicines we provide. However, often the government does not fully reimburse us for rising drug prices, and so we lose.

“In their rush to add extra services to what we do, ministers have forgotten to address the fundamental problems that are driving community pharmacies into the ground.

‘This isn’t about helping pharmacies, it’s about helping GPs by letting us take over part of their work.’

Leyla Hannbeck, managing director of the Association of Independent Multiple Pharmacies, agrees. She told Good Health: ‘The £645 million doesn’t solve our biggest problem. The basic NHS funding that we only need to function is currently £1.1bn a year short.

‘That’s why we still see pharmacists going bankrupt.

“We’re on our knees and we’re not even sure if the new money will cover the new things the government is asking us to do.”

She points out that while the new system will enable community pharmacies to provide new care, for example, it could take between 20 and 40 minutes for a pharmacist to assess whether a patient is suitable for a prescription drug for a urinary tract infection, for example.

“Will the new money be enough to pay a substitute pharmacist to cover the store’s pharmacist while they’re at it?”

If the store only has one pharmacist and they are in the process of assessing a patient, then by law the other customers cannot get their prescriptions until the pharmacist can supervise them.

Meanwhile, the cost of locums is rising.

According to recruitment agency Reed, the average wage for a substitute pharmacist in the UK is £64,571 per annum – which is why community pharmacists have told us they can’t take actual holidays – they simply can’t afford the substitute cover.

Taiwo Owatemi, a licensed pharmacist and Labor MP who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Pharmacy, told Good Health: ‘Poor wages and poor conditions at community pharmacies are causing thousands of qualified pharmacists to leave the industry, meaning these additional services will be very difficult to deliver.’

In addition, Malcolm Harrison, CEO of the Company Chemists Association, the trade association for major pharmacy operators in England, Scotland and Wales, highlights the fact that much of the newly announced £645 million will not be used to fund new patient services.

“Part of it will be used, for example, to update the IT systems needed to communicate between GPs and pharmacies to update patient records when pharmacists treat them,” he told Good Health.

The extra money is “certainly not a magic wand that will make everything right,” added Janet Morrison, chief executive of the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC), which represents England’s 11,000 community pharmacies in funding talks with ministers.

“We have suffered systematic cuts of 30 per cent since the current NHS contract with community pharmacies was introduced in 2015 – and this is the first cash injection since.”

She says the PSNC had asked ministers for an extra £875 million to see the sector through the next two years – significantly more than the £645 million that has been announced.

“From our perspective, the pressure on our industry means that the average figure for underfunding is actually around £1 billion,” she says.

Still, community pharmacists remain generally positive.

Leyla Hannbeck says: ‘Ultimately, it’s still a step in the right direction. It does show that ministers know the value of community pharmacies.’

And Mark Lyonette, CEO of the National Pharmacy Association, told Good Health: “The injection of funds is a welcome vote of confidence, even as the underlying position remains extremely challenging.

“We give our hats to the Mail’s campaign on this issue, which has supported us all the way through raising public awareness of the plight of neighborhood pharmacies.”

Janet Morrison says: ‘The Daily Mail has done a great job of raising public awareness of the crisis, which has had a major impact. Now we feel more valued and understood by the government – and that has helped us advocate for adequate funding.”

Malcolm Harrison added: ‘Thank you for what you do in telling the truth of our story and the challenges we face every day. We need the Post to campaign.’