Almost 90% of pharmacies in Northern Ireland could not pay their wholesaler bill last month, Community Pharmacy Northern Ireland (CPNI) has revealed.
Speaking to the Assembly Health Committee about drug supply issues yesterday, CPNI said that 367 of 414 pharmacies supplied by a major wholesaler “were unable to pay their wholesaler bill in January”.
The body’s chief executive Gerard Greene told the committee that global medicine shortages “are hitting harder in Northern Ireland due to deeper, systemic funding issues” and that several wholesalers have either “stopped supplying” the country’s pharmacies or “left the market totally”.
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CPNI said pharmacy contractors are “using their own money to bridge a growing gap in funding” - and warned that if the health minister does not step in to “stabilise” funding for the sector, the security of drug supply to patients in Northern Ireland “cannot be guaranteed”.
“The current payment model is simply not keeping pace with the rapidly rising drug cost prices and therefore our funding deficit is widening”, it stressed.
“As a result, pharmacies are increasingly not able to pay their medicine wholesalers’ bills.”
“Dangerously fragile”
Greene said medicine supply issues present “disproportionate challenges for community pharmacies and patients in Northern Ireland compared to other parts of the UK”.
“We met with the health minister over a month ago to raise the alarm on this situation, and to date, the actions recommended by CPNI have not been accepted,” he added.
He said the health department’s “baseline funding level for community pharmacy is wrong” and current drug shortages have “now revealed the further cracks in a dangerously fragile model”.
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“Significant disruption to the supply of medicines to patients in Northern Ireland is inevitable as a direct consequence of a failure by the department to address this,” he warned.
Greene added that the government has “repeatedly pushed back on calls to review” the community pharmacy funding model “which it imposed over 15 years ago without negotiation then or since”.
“And worryingly, the department’s own calculations have been exposed as being incorrect several times over the past year,” he said.
“Not looking for more money”
Greene said CPNI wants negotiations on a new community pharmacy contract to begin “as a matter of urgency”.
“As a temporary - but immediate - solution to this,” he added, “we are calling on the minister to suspend the clawback that the department deducts from our drug payments”.
“We are not looking for more money; we’re asking for this funding to be left in the system so that we can pay our monthly medicine wholesaler bills.”
Read more: Pharmacies losing millions a month due to NHS ‘underfunding’
Greene said pharmacies in Northern Ireland are “left scrambling around to try and secure medicines for their patients”.
He said this is “patently wrong, it is increasingly unsafe and it is not sustainable”.
And he urged the minister to “step in urgently to stabilise and fund community pharmacies properly to secure safe medicine supplies” and “work with the UK government to prioritise and protect medicine stocks for patients in Northern Ireland, as was done for Brexit and the pandemic”.
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It comes after the UK government confirmed that funding for pharmacies in England is £800m less in real terms than it was a decade ago.
Responding to a parliamentary question earlier this week, pharmacy minister Stephen Kinnock said that the real-terms value of pharmacy funding for 2025/26 is £3.073bn, compared to £3.864bn in 2015/16.
