Plenty stand to benefit from the extra £200m that the new contract has pushed into dispensing margin, but it certainly won’t be independent pharmacies - unless they act.
The new contract could have delivered a true uplift to community pharmacy and pledged £200m more into clinical services. But instead, it’s doubled down on an opaque system that forces mostly independents to ever greater and more desperate lengths to source prescription medication.
Radical change
Just days before this new contract was unveiled pharmacies were pleading for support as more are faced with the stark reality of dispensing at a loss.
But this new settlement hasn’t delivered. It won’t even touch the sides, as the average pharmacy dispensing around 10,000 items a month will still be £56,000 worse off.
Once again independent pharmacies are left on the sidelines, feeling they have no choice but to absorb these losses. To remortgage and to dip into their own personal savings.
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While the multiples – who are well represented within Community Pharmacy England – will be the biggest winners from this £200m injection of dispensing margin.
That is, unless independents radically change how they dispense and wake up to the fact that maintaining it as a manual service, driven end-to-end by pharmacists, no longer makes sense.
Crippling
Independents can’t continue to go it alone with dispensing. The cost is crippling them, and the new contract has done little to change that.
They need technology by their side, whether that’s dispensing robotics or hub and spoke.
They deserve pricing transparency. Proper systems and processes designed to maximise dispensing investment and mitigate waste.
They finally need access to the buying gains felt by the multiples.
Dispensing medication is a pharmacy’s largest outgoing. The cash that’s tied up in it within most independent pharmacies is eye watering. And that’s before you factor in losses linked to NHS remuneration, medication expiry and stock occupying areas that could be more profitably used as patient consultation space.
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Most independents have tried to reduce these losses by investing more time, mostly by pharmacists, desperately chasing down cheaper deals and better costs. But it’s fruitless.
The current system isn’t transparent. It’s rigged for everyone but them and it’s left them buying pretty much blindly.
Nonsensical
If independents want things to improve, they must be the ones driving that change. Because the current status quo benefits too many.
When pharmacy is being rightly hailed as the front door to NHS care and to preventative health, why on earth would we ask highly trained clinicians to waste their time and skill managing NCSOs and monitoring prices. It’s a nonsensical waste.
It’s time independents act and finally turn dispensing losses into deserved gains.
Daniel Lee is CEO of HubRx and Pharmacy+Health