Pharmacies of the future will more commonly be used for advice than to supply medicines, NHS England (NHSE) chair Dr Penny Dash has suggested.
Speaking at the Company Chemists’ Association’s (CCA) annual conference yesterday, Dash told delegates that in the future, it “will be unusual” to go to a pharmacy to get your drugs.
She said “you will get advice from a pharmacist”, while the “majority of drugs” will be delivered by “drones” or accessed via “barcodes”.
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“We’ve already got robotics, it feels to me like that’s a natural step to go to,” she added. “I think that the world is going to change, that people locally will need to work out what is the optimum configuration for that.”
Dash said the government is building a map of all of the country’s public estate, adding that if the private and commercial sector estates were added - not just the “bigger names”, but “big multi-site pharmacies” as well as “some of the smaller ones” - it “would be absolutely enormous”.
“I think it’s hard to say that we should keep absolutely everything, particularly as we’re moving to a more digital world,” she said.
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Dash also shared that NHSE found there is “about twice as much floor space” used for GP practices and “associated services” as is needed.
To achieve “a model of fully integrated out-of-hospital services in high quality buildings” involving multi-disciplinary teams, there needs to be “far better use of that physical space”, she said.
And pointing to the logos of pharmacy multiples on the display behind her, she said they were “all high street names with a physical presence on the high street”.
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“Why wouldn’t we be using some of these facilities to provide some of our healthcare services as well?”
It comes after the CCA in January called for “immediate investment” to secure the “future benefits of dispensing and the community pharmacy network”.
And it follows new research finding that while over 500 pharmacies have closed across England since 2022, an additional 83.5 million prescriptions have been dispensed by pharmacists each year over the same period.
