The National Pharmacy Association (NPA) today called on the Welsh government to provide pharmacies with “an urgent stabilisation payment” as it revealed that 40% of them “were not profitable in 2025”.
The body demanded a payment similar to “what has been offered to GPs” to prevent pharmacies from “crumbling under the strain of stagnant funding and increasing costs”.
And it warned that Welsh pharmacies have been “left clinging on by their fingertips” and at increasing risk of “closures and cutbacks to patients”.
Read more: Pharmacies losing millions a month due to NHS ‘underfunding’
The survey by the NPA – which was carried out last month and received responses from 246 Welsh pharmacies – also found that 60% of pharmacy owners in Wales “remortgaged their house or used personal savings to keep their doors open last year”.
On top of this, it revealed that 89% of pharmacies had stopped offering “some services” to patients or “started charging for them” as they were “no longer financially viable”.
And it found that “no pharmacy” that was surveyed “had sufficient funding to deliver their core services as set out by their contract with NHS Wales”.
“Unable to pay”
Findings also showed that a third of pharmacies were “unable to pay” their wholesaler “on time or in full at some point last year”, the NPA said.
It added that only 4% “felt confident” they were in a financial position to be able to support the Welsh government’s “Presgripsiwn Newydd (A New Prescription)” initiative, which aims to “expand pharmacy’s role to deliver more services to patients”.
The Welsh government must “increase investment in community pharmacy”, the NPA urged, otherwise there is a risk of the New Prescription service “going up in smoke”.
Read more: Pharmacies face closures and ‘lay-offs’ after autumn budget
NPA Welsh board member David Thomas said that these “shocking findings should sound major alarm bells to the Welsh government” and will cause “concern to patients who depend on their local pharmacy”.
“It is simply unsustainable and unfair to expect individual pharmacy owners to remortgage their house and dip into their pension pot to subsidise the cost of prescriptions and to keep their doors open for their patients,” he stressed.
And Community Pharmacy Wales chief executive Russell Goodway said that the survey’s findings “reinforce the very real financial pressures currently facing community pharmacies across Wales”.
Read more: Pharmacy access ‘remains good’ despite closures, Kinnock says
“Community Pharmacy Wales has been in ongoing dialogue with the Welsh government cabinet secretary for health and social care since before Christmas, seeking to secure a recurring stabilisation payment,” he explained.
Goodway said that such support “is essential to prevent further deterioration and to safeguard the sustainability of the sector”.
Read more: Economic review reveals half of pharmacies ‘not profitable’
It comes after the NPA warned that the NHS is paying back pharmacists as little as 20% of the cost of common medicines including anti-depressants, pain relief and blood pressure medication.
The body said pharmacies are being left to cover the shortfall with their own money, and called on the government to end the “scandal of pharmacy owners subsidising the bill for the nation’s medicines”.
And it follows the long-awaited economic review of community pharmacy published last March revealing that around half of pharmacies did not turn a profit the previous year.
