Bank holidays bring out all the health queries people have been concerned about for a few months and not done anything about. Or the prescriptions that have an out of stock medication on them, and there’s no doctor on duty to write an alternative prescription until Tuesday, and the patient has run out.
When will we be allowed to substitute out of stock medications? I know that conversations are starting, but we need a solution sooner rather than later.
As I am writing this, we have a few days left to sign up to all the national services to meet the bundling requirement and to get used to claiming within a month, to avoid not getting paid.
My question is to those that decided this constant cycle of change was a good idea is “how do you expect community pharmacy teams to keep up with all the changes that keep coming our way?”.
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I have seen queries on contractor and pharmacist groups where people are confused, and they’re just the ones asking questions. How many people out there don’t even know that these changes are coming?
Some people think you won’t get paid for any Pharmacy First that you deliver if you haven’t signed up to all three services.
Then when someone explains it only affects the monthly incentive payment, many say, “I never get that anyway so why bother?”.
I would rather we got rid of the incentive payment and either pay more for each service we offer, or pay a small fee for those that don’t meet the gateway criteria.
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I am struggling to keep on top of all the changes, and I know many of my colleagues are too.
When we are faced with patients and our usual workload, reading anything is near impossible, so we are having to try and keep up to date out of hours.
We try and attend the many webinars put on by CPE or LPC’s but after a long day at work most contractors just want to go home and have some dinner and see their family.
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Once we get our head around the changes, we then have to find time to brief the team. That’s all before we deliver the actual service to the patient and process the paperwork to share information with the GP and ensure we get paid.
Now that the bank holiday weekends are out of the way, let’s all hope we can use June to September to steady the ship before the emergency contraception service starts.
CPE will also be starting negotiations at the same time as NHSE starts dismantling. Hopefully 2026-2027 will give us an increase with no extra work so that we can have some security and stability.
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Community Pharmacy is fantastic, we can do so much more than we used to, we’re delivering more clinical services than ever before.
Patients don’t need to make appointments in most instances. This is all great but ultimately it doesn’t change the fact we are doing more and more work for less and less financial remuneration.
Oh, and our living costs are increasing all the time. I mean has anyone noticed how their supermarket shop costs almost 20% more than it did a year ago? That would be ok if my income had increased by 20% but...
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