NPA will become more “militant” as wait for pharmacy contract goes on

The government has been warned by the National Pharmacy Association (NPA) that community pharmacy will not back down from collective action and reducing opening hours from April 1^st.

NPA board member, Ashley Cohen, told LBC today that the sector was in a "desperate situation" and that the representative body will do “whatever we can to protect our sector”.

“We're becoming more angry, more frustrated and more militant as the weeks and the months go by and getting to a point to almost say that ‘enough is enough’,” said Cohen.

Pharmacy minister Stephen Kinnock previously told Pharmacy Business that he was “disappointed” by the NPA’s decision to push for collective action and that the government was “working at pace and have rolled up our sleeves to resolve the issues”.

However, pharmacies have seen around a 40 per cent cut to this funding in real terms since 2017, forcing record numbers to close. Around 1,300 pharmacies have shut down since 2017 including 29 since January.

Additional unfunded costs due to hit pharmacies on April 1^st include National Insurance, National Living Wage and Business rates, on top of a decade of real terms cuts which may jeopardise patient safety if a resolution is not found.

The NPA announced last week that will advise its 6000 member pharmacies in England to take the unprecedented step in the face of what it has described as an April cliff-edge that will see a range of financial burdens placed on the sector.

“Is it best for us to reduce our opening hours rather than to close permanently? I would have thought that the latter would be the case,” said Cohen, who is also chair of Community Pharmacy West Yorkshire.

“However inconvenienced it might be, we need to do something and be in control of our decisions. So maybe reducing our hours, reducing some services to protect the sector in the long term is what's needed at the moment. But as soon as we do get a settlement, we can very quickly stop this collective action.

“It's taken many years and many unanswered questions in terms of the government, to get to this state.”

Cohen revealed that in the last 12 months, he has had to put in £125,000 of his own money just to keep his business going.

He explained how the rise in NI contributions will have a massive impact on community pharmacies.

“We are a profession and what's really vitally important is that we have a contract with the government, which represents up to 90 per cent of our funding. So unlike other businesses that may be able to increase their prices or make some changes, we can't do that, we're held to a government contract, a contract that has been static for nearly a decade now,” he said.

“In some respects, I feel that we are treated a little bit like second class citizens in healthcare, where family doctors, our GP colleagues, are basically felt as part of the NHS family - but we're referred to as businesses even though our contract is very similar, almost identical to GP contracts and that's frustrating.”