The pharmacy sector has highlighted pharmacists’ “heroic role” in the Covid pandemic after an official inquiry found that healthcare workers saved the NHS from “collapse”.
A report on Covid’s impact on the UK healthcare system, published on March 19, said the country “entered the pandemic ill-prepared and with its overstretched healthcare systems in a precarious state”.
It noted that healthcare systems “were overwhelmed and came close to collapse” - and that the collapse “was only narrowly avoided because of the extraordinary efforts of all those working in healthcare across the UK”.
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The strain put upon healthcare systems was “unprecedented,” the report added, and “those working within it were obliged to work under intolerable pressure for months on end”.
And it said the pressure “was not felt solely in hospitals”, with other health professionals, including GPs and pharmacists, also experiencing “an increase in their workload and the burden on them as a result of the pandemic”.
Felt “like an afterthought”
The report looked at how pharmacies were impacted by Covid, noting that around 95% of community pharmacists in England, Scotland and Wales were “at high risk of burnout” during the pandemic.
Former National Pharmacy Association (NPA) chair Nick Kaye told the inquiry that community pharmacy “took on a bigger role as a first port of call for patients struggling to access other parts of the health service” - while another contributor said “there were days when there were ‘80 or 90 people queuing’ outside the pharmacy”.
The report said that despite the cost of running a pharmacy rising over recent years, funding “had not increased since 2016”.
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The “community pharmacy workforce was strained”, it added, with the number of registered pharmacies in the UK dropping from 14,296 in August 2019 to 13,846 just three years later.
The inquiry heard that during the pandemic, pharmacies experienced “an increase in the number of patients seeking advice for both minor and more serious conditions, a tripling of phone calls to pharmacies and a rise in the number of prescriptions being dispensed and delivered”.
And the shielding programme - which saw pharmacies in England delivering medicines to the shielded population - also “increased the workload of community pharmacies,” it noted, with similar schemes operating in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
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It said the “contribution of community pharmacists and the funding provided, albeit after the announcement of the scheme”, were “key to ensuring that clinically extremely vulnerable people could continue to access their medications without risking coming into contact with the virus”.
“It is likely that funding for and support from community pharmacists will be a necessity if any future shielding programme is introduced,” it added.
The report also highlighted that community pharmacists “felt underappreciated” during the pandemic, “particularly when they were not treated in the same way as those working in other areas of healthcare”.
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It noted that pharmacists “were not initially included in the life assurance scheme” that provided £60,000 to the families of healthcare workers in England who died after contracting Covid at work.
Three days after the scheme was announced, then-secretary of state for health Matt Hancock “posted a social media message stating that community pharmacists were included in the scheme”.
“The initial exclusion made individuals working in community pharmacy who were aware of it feel like an afterthought, which was ‘demotivating and demoralising for those people giving that care’,” the report said.
“Heroic role”
National Pharmacy Association chief executive Henry Gregg said it is “imperative” that the government acts “immediately” on the Covid inquiry’s recommendations “to ensure that the pharmacy network and the wider health service is strong and prepared for a health crisis whenever it happens”.
He said the report “makes harrowing reading” and the inquiry chair is “right to say that supporting the pharmacy network is a necessity to cope with any future health crisis”.
“That process must start right now to reverse a decade of underfunding that is leaving too many pharmacies in a perilous position,” he added.
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Gregg said the report “shows that pharmacies played a heroic role against the odds to maintain medicine supply and expand vaccination services during the pandemic”, and that they “need support and funding so they are always there to serve in the future”.
“As this report notes, it is unacceptable that pharmacies were not supported in the same way as other health professionals, despite their heroic efforts when much of the rest of the primary care system shut down.”
“Above and beyond”
Meanwhile, Royal Pharmaceutical Society president Claire Anderson said the report “recognises the essential role of pharmacists and pharmacy teams” during the Covid pandemic.
“Our evidence to the inquiry reflected how pharmacy teams went above and beyond in the face of unprecedented demand and the most challenging of circumstances - supporting patient access to care, maintaining vital access to medicines and delivering millions of vaccinations,” she added.
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She stressed that pharmacy teams “were on the frontline of the pandemic, but all too often were at the back of the queue when asking for support”.
“With continued pressures on the health service and the whole of the workforce, it is crucial that the government, the NHS, employers and others act on today’s recommendations, so that we learn from the past and build a more resilient NHS for the future.”
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It comes after the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) announced that thousands of MenB vaccines will be released from NHS supply to “ease” the demand on pharmacies amid the meningitis outbreak in Kent.
UKHSA said that 20,000 jabs from NHS supply “will be made available to the private market to ease current demand experienced by pharmacies”.
