100-hour pharmacy hatches and tannoys branded ‘a disgrace’

100 hour pharmacies must be able to provide access to all their commissioned services (inside the premises) during the 100 hours that they are open.
If staffing levels and the configuration of the pharmacy make this impossible the regulatory authorities should do something about it.
The same standards should apply to all pharmacies.
I wonder if new premises standards will be enforced?
There needs to be better monitoring of all pharmacies. My personal opinion is that most PCTs failed in adequately monitoring pharmacies. I hope their replacement does a better job.

How many would want to open the door late at night ? Trading 100 hours has certain staff overheads and -that is why we have this.

Some one coined the phrase of "Mac Pharmacy" some time ago in the RPSGB journal. They were right!

Scripts are going to increase in volume and settlement won't match it. Government is looking for even more effiency. This means wage cuts and understaffing.

Maybe they will be getting live delivery from the supermarkets or Amazon in years to come.

Think that unlikely..........!

I think Boots operates its 100 hours effectively and professionally. I know patients at 100 hours get invited in for EHC and supervised methadone and there is a balance of patient and staff safety to be taken into consideration with cost effective operational issues. Sounds as this complaint could be more like entrapment...

the americaniZation of england...all towns homogenous...there is no population need for a pharmacy to be sited in a retail park

100hr/retail park pharmacies...the demise of community pharmacy...burgers n chips!

Can't have their door open at 8am!, don't imagine that when they applied to the nhs for their 100 hour contract they would have said we will be open for 100 hours.......but our doors won't be open during the full 100 core hours!!, well if your the biggest pharmacy group in the country, no wonder you can get away with anything, looks like they treat their patients as poorly as they do their pharmacist (ref reduction in hourly pay rates esp Sundays). Just imagine if you wanted some medication for piles ......on the large speaker coming back from the pharmacy team " WOULD YOU LIKE CREAM, OINTMENT OR SUPPOSITORIES FOR YOUR PILES", just when you thought things where bad enough you have now been embarrassed publicly, for trying to help yourself......so much for information governance and patient confidentiality, well I suppose the advantage points could be considered compensation!!!

Not backing either side of the discussion as both have valid points, but ultimately in this day & age safety is paramount & I know a lot of such pharmacies would only have a pharmacist & a 'shelf-stacker' at that time of night & can be located in out of town shopping malls where they'll be the only outlet open after 7-8pm.

I used to work in a 100 hr pharmacy on the edge of a city centre & despite the area having decent car traffic passing through it still felt unsafe & deserted at times, yet with still had full access to the premises from two doors & minimal staffing - how we never got robbed, I have no idea!!

It's a difficult one. We have one in place (the rest of the store closes an hour before the pharmacy) and it works reasonably well for the final hour as customers tend to be few and far between. However, having recently done an hour's rota over the holiday period with a queue of about thirty people waiting to hand in prescriptions it became quite obvious that the system is far from ideal in terms of privacy and comfort for the patient. Also, with only two of us working in the store it would have been impractical to let people in as there's no way we could have policed what they were up to away from the pharmacy and potentially our safety could have been at risk.

To me it is strange that this has been raised now as I live and work in Bristol and South Gloucestershire and there are at least three Boots midnight pharmacies within this area, all set up for several years now! I assume that these have all been approved by the PCTs and the PSNC as being suitable otherwise Boots and other pharmacies with similar access points would not have gone to the expense of setting them up. Maybe Cambridgeshire does not have any pharmacies like this and this is why the original pharmacist found the system strange - I assume he still had his query dealt with professionally.

I have worked many times in these branches (as a locum) and I personally have never had a query that required privacy of the sort mentioned but if necessary I could have let someone in to talk privately with them. 90% of the time, the service provided is to dispense out of hours Rx, the other 10% tends to be people passing by who decide that they 'absolutely must, at 11pm' buy a bottle of Night Nurse! I have never had anyone want to discuss EHC with me for instance - if a lady needed it, she would be offered the opportunity to come inside to discuss the supply.

I am 45 and lived at a time when all stores only opened between 9-6pm, closed on Sundays and if a patient needed an script dispensed urgently, the local police had a contact pharmacy who would open up their branch out of hours. Having these branches for urgent prescriptions and OTC medicines 'out of hours' is a major advance in serving the local population, in my opinion. I understand that some pharmacists might view this as not good enough, that patients should be able to get MURs/PGDs (not that pharmacies HAVE to offer these services, of course) etc but if you leave 'legal loopholes', commercial businesses will take advantage of them. Maybe the PSNC and other interested parties should review the current situation if they are unhappy with 'midnight pharmacies' only being open via a hatch for 25 hours a week - then again, they do have their front doors open for 75 hours...

however Boots does seem to conduct it service on the street and that cant be good for patients especially those re

I feel a sense of jeolosy or political spin from the comments made by Hemant Patel when does expectation by commisioners become a contractual requirement??? please elaborate or direct me appropriately, also does he have any 100 Hrs pharmacy in his LPC and if so is this his personal view or the view of North East London LPC??