Empowering community pharmacies: The key to bridging health inequalities

In his recent speech on the need for NHS reform, the prime minister announced that support for preventative care in communities would be at the heart of the Government’s approach. Treating minor ailments and conditions in local institutions such as pharmacies helps prevent these problems getting worse, requiring the patients to make use of already overburdened hospitals and GPs.

Yet, for this approach to succeed, Britain needs broad local healthcare provision. Geography or postcode should be no barrier to getting quality preventative care. However, this is far from being the case in the UK in 2024 – and we are, in fact, moving in the wrong direction. Almost 87% of local councils in England have seen pharmacy closures within the last two years, with rural and deprived areas seeing disproportionately more of these.¹

The creation of these ‘pharmacy deserts’ exacerbates health inequalities and hinders the ongoing effort to shift the focus of healthcare towards prevention. Supporting community pharmacies, then, is the best way to both reduce healthcare inequalities and assist in this effort to rebalance the NHS towards community provision.

Staying afloat

For starters, community pharmacies need an urgent financial lifeline. Community pharmacies face an annual funding shortfall of around £68,000 each, and these valuable institutions for public healthcare are in severe need of revenue streams to stay operational. In May, a House of Commons committee concluded that the current funding model was ‘broken’, and was leaving community pharmacies in a permanent state of precarity.²

Both the current and previous Governments have made community pharmacies an important part of their plans to clear the NHS backlog - but none of these plans will get off the ground if the sector continues to lose around 1,600 pharmacies every five years.³

At least partially reversing a decade of funding cuts to community pharmacies would be a good start, and would more than pay for itself in increasing the availability of preventative care locally. Pharmacy First consultations, the New Medicine Service, and private services can all provide pharmacies with income – however, many pharmacists do not have the resources to carry out these revenue-boosting activities. Again, a small investment to widen access to these would pay major dividends, increasing efficiency and diverting patients away from GPs and hospitals.

Invest in the digital revolution

Digitalisation is key for community pharmacies in improving operational efficiency and widening access to care. Owing to outdated tech, pharmacists are spending far too much of their time on manual administrative tasks; time that could be better spent with patients. For example, pharmacists currently spend around half their time on the phone speaking with patients about their prescriptions; this process should be digitised through the introduction of prescription management systems.

Similarly, the manual filing of paperwork should instead be automated and stored on the cloud. This will be especially important now that pharmacists are taking on more primary care responsibilities under Pharmacy First – which means a sharp increase in the amount of documentation they will have to manage. Business operations like payroll can be simplified through digitalisation, and online platforms can facilitate remote consultations, increasing efficiency and widening access to care.

Indeed, Labour’s manifesto has underlined the problem, bemoaning that too many healthcare professionals still rely on fax machines and paper records.⁴ Luckily, this is all eminently solvable, and at a fairly small cost. Government investment in cost-effective healthtechs for pharmacists - such as apps and other digital platforms - would streamline operations by digitising and automating a large number of manual tasks. By increasing the number of appointments available in this way, access will be widened and health inequalities reduced.

Unlocking the power of telehealth

Of course, the Government should seek to arrest and reverse the decline of the community pharmacy sector. But, in the areas where pharmacy access continues to decline, patients will become increasingly reliant on remote care options. This can include consultations conducted over a call, or ordering prescriptions to be delivered to one’s doorstep. The Government should therefore embrace telehealth solutions as a powerful alternative to the traditional pharmacy, widening access to vulnerable patients who could benefit from these services, and promoting it as an alternative more generally.

In seeking to cut the NHS backlog and reduce healthcare inequalities, the Government has rightly chosen to prioritise reform over investment in the medium-term. However, as we have seen, a small investment in cost-effective healthtechs for pharmacies – coupled with a rethink of the current funding model – would yield disproportionately large benefits, dramatically widening access to all-important preventative care.