Pharmacies vote to cut opening hours in funding protest

Pharmacy owners in England, Wales and Northern Ireland have voted in favour of cutting opening hours and stopping home deliveries for the first time, in a protest over government funding.

The National Pharmacy Association (NPA), which ran the ballot, is calling for an annual £1.7bn funding increase to plug the “financial hole”.

The NPA represents 6,500 of the UK's community pharmacies - that's around half of them. It says 99% of those that responded to the vote said they were willing to limit their services unless funding was improved.

Pharmacies could decide:

• not to open beyond 40 hours a week, into evenings and at weekends.
• to stop providing free home deliveries of medicines which are not funded.
• not to offer emergency contraception, substance misuse and smoking support services.
• to refuse to co-operate with certain data requests.
• to stop supplying free monitored dose systems (medicine packs), other than those covered by the Equality Act.

NPA chairman Nick Kaye said the ballot result "overwhelmingly shows the sheer anger and frustration of pharmacy owners at a decade of cuts that is forcing dedicated health professionals to shut their doors for good".

He said he cared deeply about his patients - like other pharmacy teams - but he has never experienced a situation as desperate as this.

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Source: BBC News, 14 November 2024