There are many challenges facing Community Pharmacy - primarily driven by Government Cuts to our funding. In 2016 the government decided that there were too many pharmacies and that they would like to reduce the number of pharmacies, and implemented funding cuts that they believed would result in 40% of pharmacies having to close.
In particular the last few years have been particularly tough for pharmacies, and for pharmacy staff. This has become apparent by the decision of Lloyds Pharmacy - the second largest operator of pharmacies in England - to close every single one of its 200+ Sainsburys “in store” branches. To fathom the scale of such a decision - one needs to consider that Lloyds Pharmacy purchased these pharmacies from Sainsburys in 2015 for the sum of £125 million. They are now closing these branches, effectively writing off as a loss the nearly £500,000 per branch they paid to purchase them - because these branches are now virtually all loss making. Lloyds are considering closing many more branches.
A new campaign and petition was recently started by Pharmacy Bodies titled “Save our Pharmacies”, just a few days ago (at the time of writing this).The petition points out accurately that Community Pharmacy funding has been cut 30% since 2015. Considering the inflationary pressures affecting all businesses and households - coupled with a funding cut, this is causing a really difficult situation.
We do not consider ourselves at risk of closure. We are very grateful to the local community who have continued to support us.
However, we are not unaffected by these issues - and are having to look carefully at the operation of our business to safeguard our future, and are having to change the way we do things.
In particular (and on the positive side) we will be introducing a considerable number of additional services over the next few months, to introduce new revenue streams. This will also increase what we can offer the local community. On the negative side, we will need to reduce or limit some of the unfunded work that we previously did primarily as a community service. There used to be enough funding for pharmacies to cover work which was not remunerated, but this is not likely to be the case going forward, unless the government reverses its policy towards Community Pharmacy.