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In her first interview since becoming the National Pharmacy Association’s first female vice-chair in its 104-year history, Sukhi Basra talks to Neil Trainis about the challenges ahead for her and her profession…

I’ve often wondered how war correspondents felt as they reported from conflict zones, suited up in bulletproof vests and helmets marked ‘press’, occasionally scurrying for cover to avoid stray bullets and mortar fire.

Their adrenaline must be pumping ferociously, their stress levels surely going through the roof. It’s a life-or-death situation. One false move and it’s all over.

This could be an analogy for besieged pharmacies. I got a taste of community pharmacy’s very own ‘eye of the storm’ when I went to CliniChem Pharmacy, embedded in a medical centre in Pimlico, to interview its owner and newly appointed National Pharmacy Association vice-chair Sukhi Basra.

It was the first time I had interviewed a pharmacist inside a dispensary while they worked and it was an eye-opener. As I chat to Sukhi about the chaos engulfing her profession, her team members Helen and Zaneta, who Sukhi affectionately refers to as ‘Zee’, dart around us looking for patients’ medicines.

I feel slightly uneasy that we might be in their way in what felt like a pretty small dispensary but they adeptly work around us, instinctively knowing where everything is.

Sukhi has owned the pharmacy since October 1997 and initially ran it with her husband, who is also a pharmacist, across the road from Victoria Medical Centre where it is now based.

We’ve known people for over four generations

“The pharmacy had been (at the old site) for a hundred years and we bought it from a gentleman who had retired. We were newly qualifieds and thought ‘we’ll give it a go’”, she recalls.

“The pharmacy grew and the relationships around here grew. I talk about it all the time with friends. We’ve known people for over four generations who we’ve known from that day one across the road or over here who have followed us all the way.

“Some of the patients, four generations, I know their grandchildren. That pharmacy that had been there for a hundred years, I actually knew a patient who worked there who is in his 90s. He worked there in the dispensary when he was a child.”

Sukhi, like all community pharmacists, is an important part of her patients’ lives and her pharmacy is woven into the fabric of her community. But pharmacy has not monopolised her adult life.

In 2010, when she moved the pharmacy contract into the medical centre, she still owned the vacant old site and decided to set up a sweet and cake shop there called Chocodeli.

For five years, she was a pharmacist-chocolatier, spending part of her day working in the pharmacy before “running across the road to the chocolate shop”.

It’s quite amusing to think Sukhi might have dispensed a statin to a patient then popped across the road to make chocolates, macarons and ice-creams for her other clientele. The idea for Chocodeli came from Sukhi’s desire to try “something different” and “create things”.

“I’ve always been a creative person. I love the arts. I actually describe myself as a creative scientist. We thought ‘we can’t give up our lease, so we’ll go across and come into the surgery and we’ll just try something different.'

“I went off to do chocolatiering and thought ‘do you know what, I want to do something so creative because we never get to do creative things.’

“I’d maybe do two or three days (at Choco Deli), two or three days in the pharmacy depending on the staff I could get there to cover me. And after work, I would go home and carry on being creative and do all the things I needed to do. I just never stopped.

“As a chocolatier, I made all my chocolate eggs, all my moulded chocolate figurines and things. I like creating things, whether it means creating a relationship with a patient or whether it means creating food because I’m Punjabi.

“We like to eat food, we like to entertain and it just felt like ‘why not do something totally different?’ It was very random but it was so much fun.”

Sukhi says Chocodeli came to an end because “it became too much pressure” overseeing that as well as running a busy pharmacy and looking after three children. Perhaps Sukhi the chocolatier will return one day, when pharmacy is behind her.

“Maybe when I retire. But I don’t think I’ll ever retire,” she says with a smile. “I’ll always find something to do. So, I’ve got that in the bag somewhere to try again if I want to in my spare time.”

Biggest superpower was his voice

Sukhi was born and brought up in Shropshire and spent her early career working for Boots. Her father Jhalman Singh, who a Google search reveals was Telford & Wrekin Council’s first ever chairman, was awarded an OBE in person by the Queen in 2003 for his services to community relations. She describes him as “probably” her “best influence”.

“He was a really strong character. He was quite a leader in his community. He wasn’t a pharmacist but he was the mayor of his town twice,” Sukhi says.

“I remember coming back from university every weekend because I needed to go with him to whatever function he had. At 18, I had to sit next to the sheriff of Shropshire or something, or Ludlow, and accompany him on all his little trips out. I was thrown in the deep end and my dad just said ‘no, you’re coming’. I had no choice. I hated it then but I think it stood me in good stead now, when I’m with patients and being comfortable talking to new people.”

Jhalman passed away in April 2023, two days before Sukhi joined the NPA board. “I got a call to say I’d been appointed but I wasn’t able to tell anyone. But my father had suffered a stroke and he’d had a stroke for about 13 years and his biggest superpower was his voice and he’d lost his voice.

“I remember that April weekend, I went to visit him and I whispered in his ear ‘I’ve got on to the NPA’. And he was really, really pleased because he was really passionate about his children getting an education.

“He would read my pharmacy magazines before I would, then I would come home and he would say to me ‘this has come out, what’s happening here?’ He was more curious than I was in terms of things he wanted to learn. He just never had the chance to do it.

“He passed away that induction week that I had to go in (at the NPA). But I knew he wanted me to go in.”

Sukhi says her mother Gurbaksh, who was a machinist and worked in a factory that made garlic bread, is “very quiet, understated but very strong. She doesn’t need to say much but she says it all with her eyes and can command a room without saying much”.

I begin to get a sense of the type of NPA board member Sukhi has been – and what kind of Community Pharmacy England committee member she will be when she starts as one of two NPA representatives this month alongside Dorset contractor Mike Hewitson. Quietly spoken, with a keen sense of curiosity, she chooses her words carefully but is not afraid to ask questions or speak up when necessary.

After the funding settlement was announced in March, she posted her thoughts on Linkedin which would have resonated with many in her profession. “It may look significant on paper,” she wrote, “some may even call it a landmark. But for many of us on the frontline, it still feels like too little, too late, a partial correction, not a full repair.”

You never want to be the bearer of bad news

She was also critical about a lack of context from the government and CPE in their presentation of the deal and laid out several factors she felt they failed to make clear.

“The uplift to core funding will be largely swallowed by national insurance, national living wage and inflationary costs,” she wrote. “Clinical service funding is for new, additional work, not the same work better paid. In 2025-26, the sector will only receive 58 per cent of what the government’s own economic review said was needed, leaving community pharmacy with a 42 per cent funding shortfall.”

It sounded like Sukhi thought the government and CPE had attempted to mislead contractors. “That’s a good question. I don’t think it was intentional,” she says.

“We got to a point where we had a sector that was hoping for good news. We were at a point where we weren’t hearing anything and that makes the sector nervous, so we needed to hear something.

“Being able to deliver some news, even if it was a little bit of good news, for (the government and CPE), it must be quite rewarding in a way.

“You never want to be the bearer of bad news. I don’t know if I would’ve delivered it in the same way. Maybe I would’ve tried to be more harsh. But that’s me through the lens as a contractor.

“Someone’s telling me I’ve got this funding coming through, I can’t ever – and this is me as a scientist – just read the headline. I’ve got to find out what the source was. So, I think I was trying to get the context out (on Linkedin).”

The economic analysis painted a brutal picture of community pharmacy’s finances. Reports have emerged of pharmacists resorting to desperate measures, like using their pensions or remortgaging their home, to keep their pharmacies open. And there are fears the new deal will do little to ease the pain.

Sukhi says pharmacists don’t want to stop services or reduce opening hours because they know “every community is invested in their pharmacies”.

“How do you pull back and say ‘I’m not doing that because the government won’t pay me?’ It's the same with dosettes for patients. There’s a mindset they don’t think it’s worth doing.

“But when you meet patients who are illiterate or have memory loss or they have a carer who we think are maybe not doing it the way they need to because we’ve known that patient 20 years…we’re the ones who identify they might have dementia because we notice these things, we know them.

“So, we think the best thing is for them to have a dosette system but equally, we’re not getting paid for doing that work. Zee has to do about 50 of them in the next few days. We’ll have to invest time to do them because we know those patients need them. But all these little things are not recognised.”

Sukhi says she has had to reduce her pharmacy’s opening hours. After 26 years, it no longer opens on Saturdays and has stopped providing a “late evening” service.

“We’re only nine to six. We used to do nine until eight on a Tuesday and a Thursday. That’s gone. We’ve pared it right down to what we can manage and what we can sustain.

“We’ve had to really push hard. We’ve had times when my husband has locumed out (in other pharmacies) to keep it going here because you’ve got to pay wages, you’ve got to pay rent, you’ve got to do all of those things.

“And we’ve really, really worked hard. There’s been a year when I’ve hardly seen my kids. I’ve been working for as long as possible for as much as possible, trying to do as much extra work as I can, trying to think of other revenues to bring in income.”

Sukhi reveals she has not been able to meet the Pharmacy First thresholds for the last couple of months. “I know how to do it but I haven’t got the capacity to do it and I haven’t got the number of patients sent to me.

“You can have lots of really good ideas but people need to see whether they are practical. My pharmacy doesn’t have the capacity to suddenly employ a new person on the basis that maybe, new patients will come into a new service.”

Talks on funding for 2026-27 between Labour and CPE are expected to start in September and, who knows, maybe that will result in another uplift. Sukhi and Hewitson would have started their two-year stints by then.

Contractors can expect Sukhi to ask plenty of questions and challenge other members of CPE’s committee. And, as she puts it, “bring what it’s like today, what it’s like every day” in a pharmacy to those discussions.

“A bit worrying, isn’t it?,” she says chuckling, slightly tongue-in-cheek. “I’m nervous about it because I want to do the right thing. I know contractors are relying on voices like me and the independents and all the people (on the committee). I will bring what it’s like to have a drugs bill and panic and think ‘will I be reimbursed for that bill? Will it balance?’”

She will go into CPE committee talks, as she has in NPA board meetings, with absolutely no ego but, at the same time, in no mood to agree with what is being said for the sake of it.

“I don’t think I’ve ever toed the party line. I think I will ask genuine questions out of curiosity. If it means it makes people who have always done things the same way rethink something … because I need to understand and if I don’t understand, (contractors) won’t understand.

“I think going to CPE, I’ll be that smallest voice and actually really bring it to life, put the heart into what’s going on every day. How is Helen coping? How is Zee coping? How is my husband? How are we all coping?”

Sukhi describes Hewitson as “the brain” and herself as “the heart”. Sukhi might be better described as “the quiet, curious observer”. Note to other CPE committee members; it’s the quiet ones you’ve got to watch out for.

Contractors need to understand the nitty-gritty detail

“Mike is very knowledgeable. I just think ‘oh my gosh, how do you know that?’ I joke with him. I say ‘you’re the brains, I’m the heart’. If we can bring that to government so they know we are intelligent people who are doing a really hard job, but we’ve got a lot of soul and a lot of heart, it makes us human rather than just a drugs bill. That’s what my strength will be, bringing back the pharmacist into the room.”

Naivety is not necessarily a bad thing. Sukhi is not ashamed to admit that bringing an innocent inquisitiveness to proceedings can help improve her understanding of, for example, how the payment mechanisms work. There’s an assumption that pharmacists everywhere know it all.

“They know enough to run a business but they need to understand how the nuances, the nitty-gritty detail that goes with whether you benefit because you’re in London or in the north or in Scotland, how that impacts them as individuals,” she says.

“That, for independents, is really important. That’s important to NPA members because we represent people who are like me. When I first qualified, I was always on the phone to the NPA because I didn’t know anything. But that’s how you learn. You don’t come out of university with business skills. You come out with clinical skills and the foundation of what medicine is and how it functions on the body.

"You come out as an academic. You then go out into the business world and learn to be a business person. It’s not taught to you. I think that, as a sector, perhaps we need to learn a bit more.”

Sukhi thinks that being part of CPE’s setup will give her a better understanding of “the difference in demographics, how local ICB boards have different formularies, how it impacts my colleagues in the north and the south”.

“I just thought ‘oh, we’re all the same and clawbacks impact all of us the same’. People like Mike are educating me and saying ‘no, it doesn’t work that way’. And I think, ‘well, if I don’t know that, I don’t think my colleagues who are actually in it know that’. So, we need to speak for them.

“I don’t think I’ll be the expert (on CPE). I’ll be…you know you have the classroom idiot who doesn’t know anything? That person always asks the question when everyone else was thinking it when they’ve been there too long and didn’t want to ask.

“Or they thought ‘I can’t possibly ask that question’. I’m not afraid to be the one to ask that question. I’m notorious for having a notepad. I’ll make notes and at the end and I’ll say ‘can I ask a question?’ But they’re always relevant questions because I’ve absorbed what’s going on, I reflected on it, thought about it.”

One topic that might, actually should, come up in CPE committee meetings is a national pharmacist prescribing service. Former NPA chair Nick Kaye said it is “a long way away”. Hewitson said funding for it “will have to come from outside the global sum because that pot is more than fully committed to keeping the lights on”.  CPE chief executive Janet Morrison admitted it didn’t even talk about it during the last funding negotiations.

“I’m a prescriber and Helen is a prescriber and it just shows how under-utilised we are. There is so much scope for pharmacists and I’m concerned we’ve got a whole load of graduates coming out with IPs," Sukhi says.

“A lot of these things can be done in community pharmacy from a prescribing aspect. They don’t necessarily need to be done by a GP pharmacist, structured meds reviews, management of long-term conditions.

“If we are doing patients’ blood pressure checks, then we’re doing their ABPM, we know what medicine they should be on and we know when they’re on a new medicine, what responses and side-effects they should be getting and how they should be monitored.

“I don’t know whether that’s legislation, funding, what is it that’s stopping an already skilled workforce implementing roles that can be given out nationally because the benefits could be amazing.”

Myself and Sukhi have spent the best part of an hour talking as Helen and Zee feverishly work around us. There is little time left to chat about Sukhi becoming the first female NPA vice-chair in its 104-year history. That’s not because it’s uninteresting. It’s because it’s been fascinating listening to her talk about other issues.

"We needed to have good diversity that represents the front line. I know my other teammates, all the other girls on the team, Sehar (Shahid), Aisling (O’Brien) and now we’ve got Joanne (Wolfe) from Northern Ireland…if we’re here, I don’t think it means we’re better than any other female, it just means we were brave enough to take the leap. 

"And when you get there, you think ‘ok, I have got a perspective that is different and I can articulate it in a different way and open minds’. Sometimes, we just think ‘this is my space, I know this really well, I’m comfortable, why would I want to venture out?’"

As we wrap things up, Sukhi rolls out a great line. “I’m the first one in 104 years but I don’t want it to be the conversation anymore. I don’t want to be the Maggie Thatcher and no-one else comes after it for a long time.”