The Support Your Local Pharmacy Campaign petition collected its millionth signature this week and is on course to become the largest petition currently circulating in the UK. It is already the largest healthcare-related petition by far.
 
Each day, 30,000 more individuals are registering their objections to planned cuts to pharmacy services.

NPA chairman Ian Strachan said: “It is now absolutely clear that the Department of Health has misjudged how people feel about local pharmacies. Patients value the face-to-face support they get at local pharmacies; getting medicines online or seeing a pharmacist by appointment in a GP surgery is not faintly equivalent to the accessible care available in pharmacies. The government seems to think that putting a few hundred pharmacists into GP practices is a good swap for the loss of potentially 3,000 community pharmacies. I disagree. And so do at least a million patients and concerned citizens”.
 
Rob Darracott, chief executive of Pharmacy Voice, said: “The vast support that the public has shown for community pharmacy by signing up in the hundreds of thousands to the petition shows just how valuable our services are as part of primary care in England. At a time when we know GP services are overstretched it would be madness to disinvest in the healthcare professionals ready to help you on the high street.”
 
Chief executive of PSNC Sue Sharpe said: “It is fantastic to hear that more than one million people have now signed the petition in support of community pharmacy. In the month leading up to the close of the consultation we must keep this pressure up

"We know just how much local communities across England value their community pharmacies and their support for this petition proves that. The public seems to recognise what the government so far has not: that community pharmacy teams are vital front-line NHS providers who can give face-to-face healthcare advice and support at a time and place that is convenient for patients.”
 
The petition will be delivered to Downing Street in May.