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New Pharmacy contract
Will independent pharmacies suffer?
From Mr A. Pothecary, MRPharmS
Malcolm Brown’s Broad spectrum article in a recent issue of the
PJ (11 June, p706) struck a chord with me. I will have been on the register
for two years in August, and hope to one day own a pharmacy. However, in
the past few months I have reluctantly realised that this is becoming increasingly
unlikely.
At the moment there seems to be a lot of uncertainty about the future profitability
of community pharmacies, as the impact of the new contract is not known.
If it transpires that some pharmacies are negatively affected, it will
be the independent pharmacies that suffer most, as larger multiples will
have the funds available either to subsidise those branches making a loss
or to undertake whatever is necessary to change the business and make it
profitable again. If one of the large multiples is forced to close one
out of, say, a thousand pharmacies, it will be of little importance to
the company, although obviously the community it served and the staff that
worked there will suffer.
If a pharmacy owned by an independent suffers a loss of profitability,
however, there may not be the funds available to subsidise it through lean
times, and if the business ultimately fails despite the proprietor’s
best efforts, it will be that pharmacist’s family who lose their
income, and possibly even their home.
The perception I have of the general situation in community pharmacy at
the moment is that the Government is trying to reduce the sums it pays
to pharmacies to the absolute minimum. It is true that there will be money
available to pay for new services such as medicines use reviews, but in
reality how many small pharmacies will be able to provide these services?
Many lack either the space for a consultation area, or the pharmacist manpower
to provide the service; I have been undertaking the Medway School of Pharmacy’s “Skills
for the future” programme and can envisage that it will take an hour
to complete a review and the associated paperwork. The larger companies
are likely to have salaried “floating” pharmacists who can
carry out reviews in a different branch each day, or cover for the regular
pharmacist to review his or her patients.
I have worked for both large and small companies, and think that both business
models have their benefits and difficulties. However, I think that the
reason young pharmacists like myself are likely to continue as employees
or locums rather than purchase businesses comes down to the risk involved.
I believe that within the near future, the younger pharmacists who would
have considered purchasing a business in five or ten years will find it
increasingly hard to justify the risk to their financiers, families and
ultimately themselves.
In the current climate of uncertainty over future remuneration, and with
a Government that seems to change policy with the wind and constantly “tweaking” (for
better or worse), there is no way that I can justify to myself the risk
of venturing into pharmacy ownership. Perhaps this means that I am not
the right kind of person to be an independent pharmacist, or perhaps this
is why the number of independent pharmacies has been steadily decreasing.
Andrew Pothecary
Jersey |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal