NHS England is bleeding pharmacies of funding!

Pharmacy First needs an increased portfolio to add more services and the targets reduced to 10 or 12. We can’t achieve the targets if there are few services.

NHS England is bleeding community pharmacies of funding and more will go to the wall if things don’t improve. Community Pharmacy England should lift the confidentially imposed on it by NHSE. All negotiations should be put to a vote with contractors before anything is agreed with NHSE.

We need a 30-day NHS payment like Northern Ireland. The English pharmacy contract has passed its sell-by date and we must come out of the imposition of the contract by civil servants who are just the messengers and don’t have any clue how community pharmacy operates.

It should be mandatory for them to work on the front-line. I’m 74 years old and I haven’t had a holiday for two years and I’ve been a pharmacist since 1979. 

My wife and I work six days a week from 9am till 6pm every day and, at times, we do out-of-hours to dispense palliative care medicines, even after midnight or in the early hours of the morning.

We live for others to live but we feel we are not appreciated for what we do for the public. Direct access to the health secretary is the best way to go forward.

I feel we are taken for granted in the NHS and kicked around like an empty can, not knowing where we will land. The test for those outside of pharmacy is to work for a few days in a community pharmacy so they can see themselves how much hard work it is.

On one occasion, we went to a funeral for just an hour or so and a customer said ‘how the hell can Mr and Mrs Patel go to a funeral when I have come to collect my prescription?’ That’s life in a community pharmacy.

Dr Umesh. B Patel, MBE, former National Pharmacy Association board member.

It’s pathetic to reduce Pharmacy First quota!

It’s pathetic to reduce the quota for Pharmacy First. It won’t help us make the payment threshold.

In the future, how do we make people enter our pharmacy for the service, especially if GPs embark on work-to-rule? Twenty-five consultations a day is 10 more than most of them are currently doing and Pharmacy First was supposed to take the pressure off them.

We are increasingly finding that the timeframes are shrinking from the initial 111 triage to us receiving notice. It can be up to two hours later or, more commonly, now within 10 minutes of closing.

There’s no time for patients to attend in most cases and if indeed we do pick it up, most patients don’t phone.

There are staff shortages, another government clawback and 64 more LloydsPharmacy-branded hospital pharmacy sites are going.

Rob Burns, pharmacist and managing director, Avenue Pharmacy (Sunderland) Ltd.

We get zero referrals from GP – it sounds very fishy!
We are having a terrible time with Pharmacy First in our area as the local GP practice owns his own online pharmacy and funnily enough, they are processing more than 1200-plus Pharmacy Firsts every month.

It is also in the top five pharmacies delivering Pharmacy First in the UK! We receive zero referrals from the surgery. It sounds very fishy indeed!

We only manage to conduct Pharmacy First for any walk-ins. Can anything be done about this as there is clearly a direction of patients to their own pharmacy? Any help would be great!

Wahid Karim, superintendent pharmacist, New Mill Pharmacy, West Yorkshire.

If you want to get anything off your chest, contact ICP editor Neil Trainis on neil.trainis@1530.com or on X.