I’ve been watching with interest the media attention given to the cost of emergency hormonal contraception (EHC) and the price policies of various multiples over the last few days.

Watching Boots squirm over their policy, release a – what I viewed as ‘smug’ – statement, then have to backtrack when they realised they misjudged the prevailing mood, was at first entertaining.

However, on further reflection, I decided that we should all follow the developments around this issue with interest. Although an extreme example, the EHC argument opens up a debate about the value of the pharmacist’s input in ways that have wide ramifications for pharmacy medicine sales in the future.

As is often the case, it is worth noting that one multiple gets most of the bad press for doing something pretty much all the others do. It’s always been the case across the multiples that the price of EHC has been set so as to make it an affordable, but not routine, option for potential patients.

Exactly what Boots thought they said in their original statement.

The price goes some way to remunerate the extra work required for the pharmacist to personally counsel and sell the product, while meeting their wider professional responsibilities. Rightly or wrongly, this is something that seems to have been generally accepted across most of the sector without question. Since the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) made their suggestions last week, only some of the smaller multiples have made price changes.

However, I cannot remember any other pharmacy subject being so widely reported, and with such energy, which is saying something, when we consider what’s been said and done to community pharmacy recently.

The attention the media has given pharmacy pricing is a worrying development. A product we have previously felt requires a lot of counselling for a correctly supervised sale has been transformed over just a few days into a low-risk commodity than requires little more than cursory supervision. To be fair, pharmaceutically speaking, it probably is low risk. But the wider responsibilities we have in selling it appropriately won’t go away just because we sell at a lower price.

It really concerns me that this could be the first of many products that well-meaning interest groups decide wider availability of is more important than the input of the pharmacy professional. The focus on price, rather than the value of the pharmacist’s skill and responsibilities, can’t be good for the sector overall. Somehow we have allowed poor local service commissioning that we haven’t ever really addressed, to make us all look unfavourable in our core activity of medicine sales.

On reflection, perhaps we should have got BPAS to help the sector campaign to improve locally commissioned EHC services some years ago, rather than allow them to paint the big boys in a bad light now. Such negative publicity for one company surely damages the rest of the sector in a small way too.

The Area Manager has worked for all of the large multiples

How much do multiples and independents charge for EHC? Find out in C+D’s analysis here.