How a family loan may be all that's saving your pharmacy from closing trends now

Hundreds of our vital independent community pharmacies are closing for ever this year, new figures show — and thousands more look set to follow them into extinction. It’s the end of a vital lifeline for countless patients, but particularly for the vulnerable and frail.

As the Mail has highlighted, this is due to a massive NHS funding shortfall that effectively punishes pharmacists financially every time they serve us.

A chorus of voices — including cross-party MPs and peers, as well as major professional pharmacy groups — has called on the Government to rescue our pharmacies from this financial disaster.

And yet, instead, the Government has launched a costly advertising campaign, on TV, radio and social media, urging us to use pharmacies more — even though it will actually worsen their financial predicament. How could the Government minister in charge of our pharmacies be so tone-deaf to the crisis?

Step forward (or not) Neil O’Brien, the missing minister, who in September last year was appointed Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Primary Care and Public Health.

Since then, the MP for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston’s apparent reluctance to engage either publicly or privately about the pharmacy crisis has begun to develop legendary proportions.

Lord Michael Grade, the former BBC chief who has been leading parliamentary appeals to help stricken community pharmacies, has repeatedly received short-shrift replies from Neil O’Brien’s office to his requests to discuss the crisis in person.

One response last month said in full: ‘Many thanks for your letter addressed to Minister Neil O’Brien about community pharmacies and the invitation to meet. Unfortunately, due to existing diary pressures, the Minister is unable to meet at this time.’

‘It’s insulting to say the least,’ says Lord Grade.

Last month, to try to achieve some action on the issue, 49 MPs and peers from across the political divide bypassed Neil O’Brien by writing directly to his boss, the Health Secretary Steve Barclay, asking for an urgent injection of at least £400 million, along with long-term support, to enable the pharmacies to keep their doors open.

Among those who signed letters — composed under the auspices of the community pharmacists’ representative, the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC) — are some 19 Tory MPs disturbed at their own Government’s stance, as well as 21 Labour MPs, two Lib Dems and seven peers, including the former Conservative health minister Baroness Cumberlege.

So far the responses they have received — shared with Good Health — are the same cut-and-paste health department blandishments about existing funding and commitments which the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) press office consistently sends.

None of those who have signed the letter has thus far received a personal response either from Steve Barclay or from Neil O’Brien, let alone an invitation to meet with the missing minister.

Neil O’Brien’s public indifference to community pharmacies is in contrast with his prolific Twitter habit. The minister generally tweets daily on subjects ranging from vandalised park saplings and Tory Party leadership to bus services and Japanese pornography.

Only once in the past year has the minister for pharmacies mentioned pharmacies on Twitter.

In June 2022, Neil O’Brien expressed ‘delight’ that a plaque had been unveiled in Fleckney, a village in his constituency, to mark the home of Fanny Deacon, the first woman in Britain to qualify to register as a pharmacist, in 1869. The minister was not, however, among those seen gathered at the unveiling ceremony.

Meanwhile, funding shortfalls are driving our High Street pharmacies ever deeper into financial crisis, with thousands now under threat of closure.

New figures revealed exclusively to Good Health last week show that one in three independent pharmacy owners could not even pay themselves a salary last year, so dire are their financial straits.

And nearly half of businesses lost money in at least six months of 2022, according to a survey by the National Pharmacy Association (NPA) of more than 220 independent pharmacy owners in England.

At the heart of the crisis is the fact that their contract with the NHS was set in 2015 and has not been updated to reflect spiralling drug prices and staffing costs, as well as rising overheads such as store heating bills and IT upgrades to meet the requirements of the health department.

As a result, nine out of ten independent pharmacy owners made a loss dispensing medicines to NHS patients during 2022, according to the NPA study. Some 40 per cent of owners said they had increased their bank borrowing in 2022 to maintain operations.

One in five owners told the survey they’d had to turn to their own families for financial assistance. Mark Lyonette, chief executive of the NPA, told Good Health: ‘If ministers continue to ignore our appeals for fair funding, they

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