Hundreds of pharmacies closing over funding as Government urges extra to open
A worrying report reveals that over 1,200 chemists in England have shut their doors for good or severely slashed their opening hours from September 2022 to June this year, citing a critical lack of funding. Others have reduced their service times drastically, leading to an 11% cutback in total operating hours and a 5% fall in the number of pharmacies – that’s a staggering 3.4 million fewer hours of public access annually.
Malcolm Harrison, boss at The Company Chemists’ Association which conducted the eye-opening study, warned: “Without action more will either close or be forced to further reduce hours. After a decade with no funding increase, they need money just to survive.”
He sounded the alarm amid Government calls for chemists to step up and relieve overloaded GPs, but the CCA’s findings exposed patient woes over inaccessible medicines. Moreover, the report highlighted a worrying trend where pharmacies in the most deprived areas are pulling down the shutters nearly four times as often as those in better-off neighbourhoods, as richer area chemists offset NHS service losses with private operations.
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Tellingly, nine out of the ten NHS Integrated Care Boards reporting the steepest declines in service hours are located in the Midlands or North. Back in 2015/16, the core cash pot for the NHS pharmacy contract stood at £2.8billion a year; fast forward to now, and it’s shrunk to a mere £2.6bn.
The CCA claims that if the budget had kept pace with GDP growth, we’d be looking at about £3.6bn today. A Department of Health spokesperson took a shot, saying: “This government inherited a broken NHS where pharmacies have been neglected,” reports the Mirror.
Despite this, they reaffirmed a commitment to backing community pharmacists, “vital” cogs in the system as healthcare shifts away from hospitals and towards local services.
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