The National Pharmacy Association (NPA) today (May 13) demanded that NHS England (NHSE) re-does the pharmacy economic review in light of the recent pharmacy funding deal.
Published just three days before the long-awaited deal, the review found that around half of pharmacies did not turn a profit last year and concluded that 99% of pharmacies in England are “not sustainable in the long run”.
Read more: Economic review reveals half of pharmacies ‘not profitable’
But the NPA has now called for the economic review model “to be re-run following the financial settlement for 2024/25 and 2025/26”.
The body wants “independent economists” to “calculate the impact of the recently agreed uplift in pharmacy funding on the financial sustainability of the sector”, it said.
“Up-to-date numbers”
NPA corporate affairs director Gareth Jones said that “the independent economic analysis proved that there was a very considerable gap between the funding provided by the NHS and the full economic cost of providing pharmacy services”.
And he stressed that this “remains the case even after the uplift contained in the new contract arrangements agreed last month”.
“It is crucial that the government continues to focus on the need to make the community pharmacy network more sustainable [and] having up-to-date numbers on the sustainability of the sector would assist it in this task,” Jones said.
Read more: Picard: ‘I wouldn’t change a thing’ on NPA collective action
Alongside the NPA’s call for a re-run of the economic review – published in a new report this week – the membership body also recommended that:
- Community pharmacy bodies should help to “develop and propose ideas” for reform of the pharmacy contract alongside work on “substantive reform of the GP contract”
- NHSE and the Department of Health and Social Care (DH) should “fully engage all stakeholders in urgent reform of both the pharmacy and GP contracts”, focussing on sustainability, affordability and “supporting” the government’s NHS 10-year plan
- NHSE should “commission further work” on which clinical services can be most efficiently delivered from community pharmacy compared with general practice or the wider NHS - with a “focus on the economics of future clinical services and the opportunities created by independent prescribers”
Read more: Collective action – has the NPA lost some respect?
It comes after the NPA U-turned on its call for pharmacy collective action last month, deciding not to recommend the protest action, despite its members unanimously voting to protest unsustainable funding in November.
And a C+D poll revealed that some 60% of readers did not think the body made the right decision in calling off its plans for action.
But new NPA chair Olivier Picard told C+D earlier this month that cancelling the campaign “was the right thing to do”, adding that he “wouldn’t change a thing”.
