Patients will get their drugs from drones, not pharmacies, says NHS chair

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“The overall majority” of medicines will be delivered direct to patients by drones in the future and not dispensed by community pharmacies, NHS England chair Penny Dash has suggested.

Addressing the Company Chemists’ Association (CCA) conference in London yesterday (June 30), Dr Dash set out some of the changes that could take place in pharmacy service provision “as we’re moving into a more digital world”.

She said: “I’m quite sure in our future world it will be unusual to go to a pharmacy to get your drugs.

“I think you will get advice from a pharmacist, and the overall majority of drugs will be delivered to you by drones.

“Because we’ve already got robotics, it feels to me like that’s a natural step.

“I think that the world is gonna change, but people locally will need to work out what's the optimum configuration.

The NHSE chair also suggested that the UK community pharmacy estate could shrink over the years to come.”

Dr Dash said work is currently being carried out in Government to build “a map of all the public estate,” adding: “If we added on the private or commercial estate – not just the bigger names, but a number of multi-site [pharmacy businesses] as well as some of the smaller pharmacies, it would be absolutely enormous.

“I think it’s hard to say that we should keep absolutely everything.”

Touching on broader concerns relating to key health benchmarks, Dr Dash said the last decade has seen “declining quality of care” for adults with chronic illnesses such as diabetes and coronary heart disease, as well as drops in life expectancy.

“We've got to really redesign our healthcare system to get much more focused on primary care and community care and on primary prevention,” she said.

She cited Finland, Norway and New Zealand as countries where “really good population health analytics, understanding people's health needs, and then organising multidisciplinary services” have seen progress in the provision of out-of-hospital care.