Community Pharmacy in 2016-17 and Beyond

Debate between Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen and Baroness Seccombe

Thursday 20th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Seccombe (Con)]

My Lords, as a great supporter of pharmacies, especially in rural areas, may I draw my noble friend’s attention to one rural area where a pharmacist wished to open a pharmacy, but it was objected to by doctors, because they had their own pharmacies in their practice? That is a great disservice to the community, which had to go six miles to find a chemist’s shop.

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen]

That is why the pharmacy access scheme is very much there to make sure that pharmacies in these rural areas will be fully protected from any funding reductions. But the competition is there. Pharmacies on the whole are privately owned. It is important and only fair that, in these strapped times for the NHS, private companies should in some way also help the publicly funded NHS.