Pharmacy minister Stephen Kinnock heard how community pharmacies are ready to expand the range of services they offer but needed to finanaical backing from the government to do this.
In a roundtable attended by senior representatives of the community pharmacy sector, Kinnocj was pressed on £2.6 billion funding gap identified in NHS commissioned Independent Economic Analysis between the costs of running a pharmacy and funding received from the NHS.
Senior representatives from the Company Chemists Association (CCA), Independent Pharmacies Association (IPA) and National Pharmacy Association (NPA) met the minister and Department of Health officials ahead of the expected start of negotiations for the next round of community pharmacy funding.
They reminded the government of the immense pressure facing pharmacies of all sizes and recent funding uplifts needed to be the beginning of a journey, not the end of one.
“It was really important today that we joined together as a sector so could deliver the same message, loud and clear to government ministers,” said Henry Gregg, Chief Executive of the National Pharmacy Association.
“Pharmacies have enormous potential to provide a wider range of services to their patients than ever before, delivering massive benefits to the whole health system and helping ministers to achieve the 10 year plan.
“However, this cannot happen whilst pharmacies have been closing in record numbers and those that have kept their doors open have done so by going to extraordinary and unsustainable lengths.
“We have told the government today that we’re up for working with them to deliver new services but only with a sustainable funding package that closes the funding gap identified by the NHS’s own analysis.
“We also raised with ministers the need to utilise independent prescribers or risk seeing these valuable skills leave community pharmacy.”
Malcolm Harrison, Chief Executive of the CCA, stressed that with the right support, pharmacies can help achieve the government’s ambitions in the 10 Year Plan to provide an expanded range of services and help shift care into the community.
“We were delighted to join forces with fellow our trade associations to meet with the Minister,” said Harrison.
"We are steadfast in our collective belief that community pharmacy has a crucial role to play in delivering the government’s 10-Year Plan for the NHS. Our own modelling shows how pharmacies could help to free up 51m primary care appointments each year.
"Delivering change of this kind, however, relies on investment to close the gap between the cost of providing NHS pharmaceutical care and what the NHS currently pays. For pharmacies to be able to deliver more quality clinical care, and provide additional capacity in NHS primary care, the foundations must be fixed.”
