Dear Mr Mowat,

I am writing to you after reading in C+D that you were forced to defend the planned cuts to the pharmacy sector in England during a parliamentary debate last month. As a pharmacist, I believe I understand why you find yourself in this difficult position.

According to the national press, you were – like me – a supporter of remaining in the European Union, so you may have been perplexed that so many people voted for Brexit. Everyone who voted out will have had a reason to leave the security and economy of the world’s largest trading bloc, but I would argue it wasn’t a good reason. In my opinion Brexit is ill conceived, not thought out, and these voters were badly advised.

So it beggars belief that it’s happening again as educated and experienced parliamentarians, elected to govern the country for the betterment of society, can be so naïve as to allow these cuts. The Department of Health, by this crude fiscal winnowing of pharmacies, is going to cut its nose off to spite its face. Therefore, please listen to Michael Dugher and other MPs who understand the damage of this excessive funding reduction.

Consider also the aggregated judgment or “wisdom of crowds” principle of the majority that elected you to parliament. If you doubt the importance of pharmacies, ask yourself why the largest ever healthcare petition is in support not of GPs or junior doctors, but of pharmacies.

Note the petition was in support, not of pharmacists, but pharmacies. Pharmacies are community healthcare centres with diverse staff including pharmacy technicians, healthcare and stop smoking advisors, and health champions – as well as pharmacists. So your comment about “the recruitment of 2,000 pharmacists into GP practices” completely misses the point. That’s like saying you’ve addressed poverty by putting more money in the banks.

Are your civil servants hiding things from you? Have you missed that it costs £100 for an out-of-hours doctor to write a script when someone calls 111 for their inhaler, but only £10 via a pharmacy emergency supply scheme? £30 for a GP appointment to treat threadworms, but £5 through a pharmacy minor ailments scheme?

Even that is selling us short. PricewaterhouseCoopers calculated that community pharmacy services contributed to England a net value of £250,000 per pharmacy.  Three thousand closures would lose the government £750 million every year, increasing the NHS deficit monumentally.

I know you are an intelligent man, a compassionate man. You will have entered politics because you wanted to improve society in general and the life of your constituents in particular. But you have been listening to the wrong people and you have been badly advised, so can I suggest you follow the actions of 1.8m people every day and ‘ask your pharmacist’. But you’ll need to hurry if you still want to find one.

Sincerely,

Xrayser