Community pharmacists are fighting the fight of their lives right now. As they hang on by a thread amid rising input costs and falling remuneration, they are being told to take comfort from a new clinical dawn. A new chapter to our fortunes beckons as a more collaborative approach to lobbying bears fruit.

As many of you can imagine, I do not share this view. I will have neither the confidence nor belief that we have turned a corner unless we can successfully put our energies and minds into addressing the worst financial crisis in our history.

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As the Association of Independent Multiple Pharmacies (AIMp) has identified, the sector has been stripped of £1.1 billion and that amount is rising by each passing month because our debt as a sector is growing by each passing month. Without a vibrant funded network, I believe our sector will be priced out of existence. Why? Because alternate models of assembly and distribution will rely on fewer players.

The current models actively involve several thousand independent businesses competitively tendering on price. This is a procurement model that has served the nation with reliability and consistency. We have driven down costs to taxpayers and patients and this has resulted in the lowest costs of medicine procurement across any Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DH) seems to have an obsessive fixation with automating our sector across differing legal entities. Automation with fewer players means medicine prices will rise rather than fall. In addition, there is an assumption that automation will somehow free up time and give staff more time to pursue a more integrated clinical offering. This assumption is misplaced. There is no evidence of that happening right now and automation does not create the savings in human resources that have been proposed, but the government is not listening to the facts.

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This is a public sector service we are talking about. Pharmacies are part of the very fabric of people's lives. We are playing fast and loose with a system that was never broken. Concession pricing has only added to our current diet of headaches but this particular conundrum is now beyond a sideshow.

Much has been written around the subject of supply chain concerns and it certainly would seem sensible to get leaders and stakeholders around a table to work through this, as proposed by AIMp. However, it’s my view that because of the uncertainty and fragility of the medicines market, the time has come for a more radical solution.

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The DH must have the real picture and not this apparent spot pricing of generics. This is the only way to ascertain the true pricing within our market. The data right now is being sourced from way too few suppliers and there are clearly huge unaccountable discrepancies between dispensing bench prices and some wholesale exit prices. Real-time pricing at least will ensure that this is one less nightmare to our inevitable demise without the fair core funding we desperately need.

Ian Strachan owns Strachan Pharmacy, which has four branches in north west England, and was National Pharmacy Association chair from 2014-2018