Pharmacy (Responsible Pharmacists, Superintendent Pharmacists etc.) Order 2022

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2022 Lords Chamber

My main message to the Minister is this: surely there is now a case for Ministers setting out a long-term vision for community pharmacies, placing them at the heart of primary care and ensuring that there is funding and workforce support to enable this to happen. Given the tremendous pressure on the health service, we have a huge untapped resource which we must fully encourage to do all it can to support patients at a very difficult time. I beg to move.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on bringing forward the order before us today. I am interested to understand the background to why we are moving from ministerial discretion to regulated control. I think my noble friend will assure the House this afternoon that the concerns raised by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee have been addressed and that any changes will be brought forward by statutory instrument, in which case the committee and the House will have the opportunity to look at them.

I join the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and my noble friend, in paying tribute to community pharmacies for the work that they have done throughout the years, and particularly during the Covid pandemic.

What will the position of dispensing doctors be, who fulfil a role where community pharmacies do not reach? Quite a large network of rural areas is served by dispensing doctors. As the daughter and the sister of dispensing doctors, and as someone doing outside work with dispensing doctors, I think it is appropriate that we look at how they are potentially being asked, for example, to deliver a booster jab this autumn at the same time as the flu jab. That will pose enormous logistical challenges for community pharmacies, dispensing doctors and others. How do my noble friend and his department expect to address those challenges so that the rollout will go as smoothly in the autumn—particularly if it is combined with a flu jab—as it did in the previous three or four rounds?

[Lord Grade of Yarmouth (Con)]

My Lords, the health or otherwise of independent community pharmacies can be judged by the rate of closures, which has been increasing over the last few years for a number of reasons, not least the overall deal with the NHS. That deal requires, for example, an individually owned community pharmacy to be deemed to have received the same discount on the purchase of drugs that Boots and the other big chains get on volume discounts. There is a serious crisis in this sector. Can my noble friend the Minister give us some idea of the rate of closure? If he does not have the statistics today, perhaps he could place them in the Library. Closure is an upward trend.