Does this mean that Scottish pharmacies have hit the jackpot!?! Well, of course not, this is to ‘ease pressures’ currently faced by pharmacies, and numbers can be very misleading. A routine response from the Department of Health when challenged on pharmacy funding, is that they back community pharmacies with £2.6billion a year!
Now to a lay person that sounds like an awful lot of money, and they are right but what this big number hides is that the vast majority of it, and the £20m in Scotland, simply pays for the medicines supplied to us as patients. It really has nothing to do with pharmacies other than they have to carry this cost for two months before they are re-imbursed by the government. And when the cost of drugs go up, like they have done over the last couple of years, the bit left over to actually fund pharmacies and services goes down, unless funding is increased there is no way of ring-fencing that money.
During Covid and afterwards, the Government have repeatedly said that they want pharmacies to provide more services and take the pressure off GP surgeries, and to be fair some small additional money has been promised. However, like the rest of the country, pharmacies are seeing huge rises in energy and other costs, along with rising drug costs eating away at the £2.6billion pot, resulting in the closures of pharmacies in unprecedented numbers and services being cut or suspended.
I firmly believe that we must get to a situation where the drug spend is separated from the actual funding of pharmacies and the services they provide, after all it is not the pharmacies negotiating prices of drugs with the manufacturers, it is the government.
The current situation is a bit like buying a train ticket from London to Manchester, and being told that because of the cost of fuel the service will stop at Stoke and you have got to make your own way to Manchester from there. The offer of the £20m for Scottish pharmacies is I am sure welcome, but it comes on the back of Community Pharmacy Scotland rejecting the government’s proposed 2023/24 financial package the previous Friday, as being ‘Far short of what is needed’.