Community Pharmacies

Melanie Onn Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd October 2019 Westminster Hall

[Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) on securing this important and timely debate on community pharmacies. Those are critical resources at the heart of all the communities in our constituencies and the first port of call for many of us who experience common or low-level health complaints.

In the North East Lincolnshire clinical commissioning group area, there are no fewer than 30 pharmacies, ranging from branches of Boots—we have already heard some discussion about that this morning—and pharmacies operating out of supermarkets to companies such as Periville, which runs three pharmacies on Cromwell Road, Wingate Parade and Ladysmith Road, two of those out of medical centres. Day Lewis Pharmacy, in Scartho medical centre, gave me my flu jab last year—thanks very much—while Cottingham Pharmacy on Wellington Street in the East March area has been run by the family for 60 years.

We talk about the community element of pharmacies, and Tim Cottingham recently joined me and the Labour campaign for drug reform in a community event hosting about 150 people to talk about the development of drug treatment, the lack of community drug and alcohol support, and the essential role played by pharmacists. Tim knows so many of his customers and provides an incredibly intimate service, working with them to improve their health and move them further away from the trappings of addiction. The tales he told the audience, with compassion and empathy for the human being behind the addiction story, were quite remarkable. That was something I had not seen or heard before, and I was not necessarily expecting it. It was very eye-opening, and we should recognise the important role that pharmacists play in people’s day-to-day lives. Pharmacists provide vital services to residents in Grimsby, and not only do they dispense medicines to those who need them, but they provide residents with advice and guidance to ensure they make a rapid recovery.

North East Lincolnshire pharmacies also take pressure off GPs by providing a minor ailment scheme for anyone who does not pay for their prescriptions, and by providing free advice and treatment for illnesses such as colds, coughs, flus, hay fever, dry eyes, athlete’s foot, conjunctivitis and many other complaints that might end up at a GP’s door without the presence of such an amenity. Given how important our pharmacies are to our health system, it seems counterproductive for the Government to say that they want to develop sustainability and transformation plans for the long-term needs of local communities, and then to cut nearly £300 million from the community pharmacy budget, thus harming those amenities that sit at the heart of our communities.

The impact of the cuts has been severe. The Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee found that in the two years since the cuts were introduced in October 2016, more than 200 pharmacies across the country closed their doors. That includes E A Broadburn of Scartho, which operated and moved into a medical centre, but ended up closing due to loss of footfall.

Lloyds Pharmacy on Dudley Street is part of a much larger corporate structure, but presumably it was not making the returns from that site and decided to close. It sits right on the edge of the West Marsh, which is one of the most deprived communities in Great Grimsby, and that closure meant the loss of another service, including out-of-hours provision.

Independent, stand-alone stores are not necessarily inside medical centres, hospitals or supermarkets, and they can provide 24-hour pharmacy services much more easily than those that are co-located in medical centres. Such closures therefore mean the loss of another service and emergency access pharmacy on which communities rely. Both those shopfronts remain empty, which means another hole in the small parades of shops in which they sat. They were not quite on the high street, but they were certainly on community high streets, and such things make people feel that their communities are not being properly invested in.

In 2017, Ian Strachan, then chair of the National Pharmacy Association, pointed to pared-back services, reduced opening hours and lower morale in the pharmacy workforce as evidence of the pressure that all pharmacies are experiencing. Will the Minister confirm that the extra investment in primary and community care that was announced by the Government last month will not only cover the costs of any extra service that pharmacies might be expected to provide, but will reverse the cuts in real terms?

Great Grimsby contains a number of good medical centres that include multiple GP centres and often contain pharmacies. However, there are also an awful lot of empty spaces, and for a number of years the intention has been for some services to be offered in those community settings. Some things that are done in hospital could be done in the heart of the community, which would be much easier—and there is space available. If that happened, and if some of those services were to operate out of those community-based centres, that would increase footfall and aid some of those pharmacies by giving them the opportunity to reach more people who would otherwise go to hospital.

Pharmacies are often on the frontline when patients encounter wider problems in the NHS. For example, when the contraceptive Microgynon 30 went out of stock earlier this year, it was the pharmacists who spent time informing patients and trying to find solutions to get around the scarcities. All that takes far more time than simply dispensing the drug and can have an impact on pharmacies’ bottom line. The Operation Yellowhammer report told us that we might face many more drug shortages in the event of a no-deal Brexit, so have the Government involved pharmacies in no-deal planning and taken into account the pressures that pharmacies might experience due to drug shortages in the event of no deal?