What’s the most creative way you have tried to advertise your pharmacy? If you’re short on ideas, perhaps take inspiration from retiring pharmacist Phil Hunt.
An ad for his first pharmacy, bought in 1972, adorned the fabric of a hot air balloon alongside a carboy and pestle and mortar. Hunt even had the colours match his beloved Aston Villa team in claret and sky blue - even though the pharmacy was based in Clifton, Bristol.
And that’s just the start of Hunt’s storied career in the pharmacy sector.
Student to owner
“I was lucky,” he tells C+D. “I did my second six months of my pre-reg split with an independent pharmacist called Jack Bond.
“His group was based in Somerton, Somerset, and I did my university dissertation on stock control. He got me in there to run his distribution service.”
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Bond took Hunt to one of his premises in Clifton, Bristol, to show him how it was run.
After Hunt qualified in 1972 aged 23, he returned from a holiday to a letter from Bond telling him to “come to the Clifton shop on Monday morning – you’re in charge”.
Three weeks later, Bond told Hunt he was either going to close the shop or sell it – and so, in October 1972, Hunt became the new owner.
Chatting to patients
Elliot’s was the first of eight pharmacies that Hunt, who has come to be affectionately known locally as “Phil the Pill”, would go on to own.
Hunt has had a stint on the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain’s (PSGB) council from 1982 to 1985, at one time had a separate wholesaler business and recently ran a pharmacy offering supervised consumption for as many as 200 patients.
His work on the latter won him C+D’s 2023 Team of the Year award, and Community Pharmacy Avon & Wiltshire also gave his pharmacy two awards in recent years. It is testament to the ease he feels being at the front of the pharmacy, speaking to patients, rather than sorting medicines in the back.
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“When we used to make medicines, to be honest, it was a fuss,” he says. “I was never a big fan of it. You’re not going to make any money out of grinding up tablets.
“The first thing I did when I left university was cut the sleeves off my white coat. I didn’t want to be branded as some sort of erstwhile chemist and live in the back of a shop.
“I rejoiced chatting to people about medicines they were getting.”
Early retirement
After just under two decades working as a pharmacist, Hunt and his wife decided to retire early to South Africa, selling his pharmacies to wholesaler AAH in 1991.
But even abroad – and retired - Hunt just couldn’t quit the pharmacy sector.
He says he saw local pharmacies making “much better money” in South Africa than the UK – and that his own application to supply generic medicines there was declined.
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“The government was keen to keep their own supply mechanism for generics because they realised there was a lot of money to be made out of it,” he explains.
“The price they were charging through to the pharmacies was significantly higher than we would pay back in the UK.”
Back in the UK
Hunt now regards his time in South Africa as an “extended sabbatical”, with family commitments bringing he and his wife back to the UK a decade later.
He says that when he first left in 1991, the NHS and the government were “getting more and more mean” about paying pharmacists.
Upon returning to his home country, Hunt saw the “squeezing had got worse” and the revision of the drug tariff in the early 2000s “took away a huge amount of profit people were making”.
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“It turned the tide against the big players, the Lloyds of this world, as their business model no longer worked.”
Hunt’s return to pharmacy in the UK began with locuming and a managerial job, before he eventually opened a pharmacy in Bristol’s Stokes Croft area with a colleague.
“Having two shops is dreadful”
Stokes Croft Pharmacy is the only pharmacy Hunt has owned since he returned from South Africa.
“I was aware a long time ago that one profitable pharmacy was a better deal than having two or even three, because you end up with a lot more problems,” he says.
“Having two shops is dreadful because you can’t be in both places all the time, you don’t have any credibility as an employer, so you have difficulty recruiting the best people.
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“It becomes a lot easier with five, six or seven shops. But one profitable shop is often the best outcome.”
Hunt, who bought out his business partner in 2018, recommends that pharmacy owners “find a niche that will make them money”.
“It is entirely dependent on where their pharmacy is, what style of pharmacy they have,” he says. “There are plenty of pharmacies in wealthy areas making loads of money out of GLP-1s.
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“Try various things and go for it instead of sitting there and bemoaning [that you’re] not making any money.”
But he recognises that the sector should be fairly compensated through funding to begin with.
“We should be paid to do the fundamental job we do, and be paid on top of that for the services we provide in addition,” he says.
Stokes Croft
Stokes Croft Pharmacy is set up in what Hunt describes as a “difficult area” due to high levels of drug use - but as he has previously revealed to C+D, his philosophy of “do to others as you would be done by” has persisted.
His pharmacy was initially designed to accommodate 50 patients a day collecting supervised methadone or buprenorphine tablets, but the number has increased four-fold since.
“Now, we’ve got just over 200, most of them coming in every day. We’re probably the busiest from that in the whole of the southwest of England.
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“We designed the place internally to deal with that. We’re set up to do 50 [patients] and then aim for 100 daily supplies on the list.
“It’s made the place quite profitable, and our Google rating is 4.6,” he says. “For a pharmacy dealing with 40 different nationalities and 200 addicts, that’s not too bad.”
Hunt recalls a priest who had moved into the area once visiting him and asking how he had made the pharmacy the highest-rated in the area. Hunt’s response sums up what he has been doing his whole career.
“I said ‘by talking to people like I’m talking to you’. We’ve got three awards on the wall.”
“The respect of a community”
Hunt has served thousands of patients, some he considers friends, but he has been involved in some less-than-friendly situations at Stokes Croft Pharmacy, too.
In one incident, he was threatened with a screwdriver – but thankfully, his regulars had his back.
“He said he was going to stab it in my eye,” Hunt says. “Some of the methadone lads were in the pharmacy at the time when he was waving this thing around yelling and screaming.
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“They turned around to him as a group and said ‘shut up! Phil’s one of the good guys’. They physically picked him up, opened the door and flung him into the street.
“That’s the sort of thing that happens when you’ve got the respect of a community. When they’re queueing up, they say, ‘somebody over there’s trying to shoplift, we’ll stop them’.
“They do the security and policing for us! Because of the regard for the service, we give them.”
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C+D reported on a recent encounter in which Hunt was attacked by a man who threatened to infect Hunt with AIDS unless he received methadone.
“There were none of our lads around at the time but one of our customers walked out and told two builders walking by, ‘they’ve got a problem in the pharmacy’. They walked in and looked at this chap who had me round the neck.
“The guy dropped the syringe and skedaddled off as quick as he could, and the police tracked him down. He got eight years and eight months.”
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Despite feeling a “bit perturbed”, Hunt says the experience did not faze him too much.
“Sometimes the dull moments are not so dull! I carried on working till the end of the day and was in the following day.”
And while he now feels “plenty old enough” to retire from the sector for good, he is proud of the respect he has built throughout his career.
“The regard I’ve had... Even if it’s only a fish in a small pool, that small pool thinks well of me. I like that. I prize being liked. It’s a failing of mine but I do anyway.”
