The Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 266 No 7152 p815-820
June 16, 2001

  RPM
  In-store pharmacies
  Pharmacy medicines
  Patient packs
  The Profession
  Future of pharmacy
  Coronary heart disease
  Influenza
  Checking technicians
  Dianette
  Paracetamol
  Monitored dosage systems
  Disillusioned youth
  Code of Ethics
  SGM
  Disposal of medicines
  Separate register
  Onlooker
  The Journal

Resale price maintenance (2 letters)

What’s done is done — let’s look to the future

From Mr J. R. Armes, MRPharmS

I have not been surprised to see a great deal of the pharmacy press generally weeping for the loss of resale price maintenance. The independent retail arm of the profession is worried for its future. One of the few things that is certain in life is change. The concern now is that the big will eat the small. But I would like to proffer the view that it is the fast that will outpace the slow, regardless of size.

I have just had the privilege of a Saturday morning locum in a local Lloyds Pharmacy shop where initiatives such as National Diabetes Awareness week are clearly supported. Here is a proactive group that will surely reap the rewards of its current efforts in the future. Furthermore sales of hay fever and other over-the-counter products have been extremely brisk despite the close proximity of two supermarket pharmacies with discounted medicines heavily promoted.

As far as I am aware Lloyds (and Moss) have chosen not to compete with the supermarkets on price. This has been to no apparent detriment. Maybe this is the best tactic for the remainder of the profession to take now.

The fact still remains that the average community pharmacy receives 6 per cent of its sales from ex-RPM lines and around 85 per cent of its income from the National Health Service. Prescription margins have been reduced by around 5 per cent in the relatively short time I have been on the register. Might I suggest that if pharmacy feels it is in a perilous financial state it is not the sudden abolition of RPM that has brought it about but the erosion over the past 30 years of NHS margins? The only sensible view I believe we can now take is “what’s done is done” and all we can do is influence the future to the best of our abilities.

Jeremy Armes
Harrogate, Yorkshire

Career move?

From Mr S. M. Koumis, MRPharmS

The sudden removal of resale price maintenance has sent shockwaves throughout the pharmacy profession. But I doubt very much whether small independents will actually board up and go home. The multiples and supermarkets, not content with taking a large slice of the over-the-counter market, will be clambering to take the National Health Service contracts off their hands. This may be good news for the elderly and disabled, but spare a thought for those of us who might eventually have to take up employment with these companies, as more independents are gradually taken over.

From my experience, the small independent will give the pharmacist the freedom, drawing on their initiative and experience, to manage a pharmacy with minimal interference. Unfortunately, the large multiples tend to be autocratic in the way the business is run, ie, stock range, staff hours, promotions, etc, are all governed by head offices which make almost all the important decisions.

Given the choice, I know where I would rather be working, but with RPM dead and buried, there soon will not be a choice. Some time in the not so distant future, the time will come to make a shrewd career move (to bus driving, perhaps).

S. M. Koumis
Ilford, Essex

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