Happy New Year. On Christmas Eve, the family and I attended a traditional carol service in our village. By the time we got home it was dark and I had a painful throat.
A glance in the mirror - with angled phone torch for light - showed what I feared given we were going away on Boxing Day morning - white stuff on my larynx.
Despite it being 10-minutes before 5 on Christmas Eve, my GP took a look at the photo I emailed over before they closed for the holiday and told me what I needed - from my local community pharmacy.
Within two hours of me murdering ‘Hark the Herald’ in church, I had what I needed and primary care (including the pharmacy that was open until 7pm) delivered.
That is how, by video, phone and a pharmacy open for business, it’s supposed to work.
Read more: Big interview: Well super Ifti Khan - ‘We are pure pharmacy’
Of course my festive experience is not a constant and, for many, it doesn’t operate like that at all but a version thereof is the ‘retail’ offer Ministers dream about between now and the next election.
Very shortly the government’s Ten Year Plan for the NHS will be a year old but I’m not the only one to say it doesn’t have much to show for it.
For one, ‘neighbourhood health’ remains a vision without a plan and is one of the main causes of the increasingly bitter dispute between GPs and the Secretary of State.
The ‘Community Pharmacy Prescribing Service’, which promises to build on Pharmacy First and the ‘Independent Prescriber Pathfinder Programme’, remain manifesto commitments in name only.
Read more: IP pathfinder programme ‘saved’ pharmacists from leaving sector
Meanwhile, the (very welcome) increase to the 19p uplift in the single activity fee has been all but wiped by the (very unwelcome) increase in Employers NI, inflation and rises in the National Minimum Wage.
You can understand why the NPA are asking Ministers why pharmacy can’t benefit from the same u-turn pubs are getting. Maybe pharmacies should bar Labour MPs in the same way as landlords did last year?
Panicking
What’s to come early in 2026? Well, the Ten Year Workforce Plan is on its way and we will see if, as wisely called for by my former select committee, it embraces the community sector by levelling up pay, opportunities and training with the acute sector.
The great fear is it is being put together in isolation and will mirror the Ten Year Plan in strength of ambition and rhetoric while offering few actual answers.
One could be forgiven for asking what more community pharmacy has to do to prove itself.
Before Christmas, while people were panicking off the back of media reports because they’d neglected to get their flu vaccine in good time, who stepped up to jab thousands of the (self-pay) population? You guessed it.
Read more: NHSE announces pharmacy fee uplifts for Covid and flu jabs
And as ever with so much of the work done in community pharmacy, it’s extremely hard to prove the worth; in this case the number of people who did NOT present at emergency departments with severe flu because they’d been protected by the vaccine.
As Community Pharmacy England heads towards a new funding round, I fear we’re going to witness (as I reported in C+D last Autumn) a rear guard action from Janet Morrison et al to KEEP existing clinical services - not add NEW ones.
Of course we should be expanding the Hypertension Case-Finding Service into a proper community hypertension service but it’s a big ask.
Serious
Page 28 of the Ten Year Plan boldly state; “As we do more in the community - funded by a reduction in hospitals’ share of total NHS expenditure - we will reduce demand on hospitals”. Quite.
If ministers are serious about the left shift, if they really want to move from sickness to prevention, if they want that retail offer to be noticed, they are going to have to do it and do it soon.
A revitalised primary care system, with community pharmacy as an equal partner, really would be evidence of the government making progress in its mission to ‘fix’ the ‘broken’ NHS.
And it would help bring the promise of the Brine Christmas Eve to many more grateful voters come the next general election.
Steve Brine is a former pharmacy minister and co-host of the health and politics podcast, ‘Prevention is the new cure’.