The announcement of an unprecedented expansion in healthcare services provided by high street pharmacies conveys the kind of fresh, revolutionary thinking the NHS needs to ensure its long-term survival.
For the first time, local chemists will be permitted to write prescriptions for seven common conditions, including earache, sore throats and urinary tract infections, without reference to a General Practitioner.
Nearly half a million women will be able to access oral contraception without having to talk to a practice nurse and blood pressure assessments will also be provided.
In all, the changes are expected to free up 15 million GP appointments for those with more serious illnesses. As well as cutting waiting times at GP surgeries. This should also reduce pressure on hospitals’ A&E departments, where numerous patients go by default because they’re unable to see their family doctor.
As the son of a community pharmacist and a GP, Rishi Sunak knows precisely how important this reform could be to fulfil his promise to cut NHS waiting lists, but there’s a massive snag. Owing to soaring wholesale medicine prices, the spike in energy and staffing costs, chronic government underfunding and late repayments, community pharmacies are engaged in a frantic fight for survival.
Almost 700 closed between 2015 and 2022, and with nine out of ten making a loss on dispensing medicines to NHS patients, the toll will only increase.
A newspaper outlet has campaigned passionately for government action to save our pharmacies before it’s too late. Contracts, unchanged since 2015, must be revised to reflect rocketing prices and repayment urgently speeded up.
Real-term funding levels have plunged by a staggering 30 per cent in those eight years. It’s an unsustainable situation. Local chemists provide a community lifeline, somewhere the elderly and unwell can go without an appointment and confide their concerns to a compassionate ear.
They’re only too willing to shoulder more of the burden put on the NHS but they just can’t do it without the necessary resources. Rishi Sunak should know that better than anyone, and if he wants these vital reforms to flourish, he must pay pharmacists a fair price for their efforts.
And good luck to the pharmacists because all those lonesome elderly people will probably be at their pharmacy every day, thus taking the pharmacist away from their job, so your medication will probably take longer to be checked.
Rather than paying General Practitioners for the number of patients on their books, they should be paid for each face-to-face consultation.
Also, they should stop this nonsense of only allowing 10 minutes for consultation because slightly more time spent on each patient could repeat fewer visits and perhaps achieve a more precise diagnosis.
Their working week should also include weekends, the same as it is for many of us, plebs. This might have a dramatic impact on the turnover at golf clubs, but hey ho someone has to suffer, but hopefully no longer their patients.
General practice GPs are in a state where the Government has not trained enough doctors and nurses for an extremely long time, and evidently, they’re not paying them enough for them to stay in the United Kingdom, although there are remaining doctors that work extremely hard, seeing more patients than ever before.
However, we have to remember that chemists remained open all through the pandemic, whilst doctors hid away.
Pharmacists tend to get to know their customers, unlike GPs of today, some of whom don’t even bother to read your notes.
Yet during the pandemic, some doctors were driving about in their posh cars, making a fortune during COVID.
First of all, we were told that the GP couldn’t see you go to A&E. Now it’s don’t go and see your GP, go and see a pharmacist. Then all the pharmacists will close because they’re too overburdened – then who will we see when we’re sick?
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 