You have too many community pharmacies, each containing too few pharmacists. This might be the conclusion a Finnish visitor to this country would make if he or she was to compare community pharmacy practice in the UK with that in Finland.
One benefit of attending conferences overseas is the opportunity to make such comparisons. One pharmacy in Finland visited by The Journal during the AESGP conference last week employed 12 pharmacists (pp820-1). It was the only pharmacy for the 25,000 people in one of Helsinki's suburbs.
Our feeling is that both the UK and Finland represent extremes of the spectrum of distribution. A happy medium would allow customers easy access but give pharmacists the support they need for their future roles.