Michael Dugher MP: Government must urgently rethink community pharmacy cuts
3 min read
Michael Dugher MP writes ahead of his House of Commons Adjournment debate on proposed funding cuts to community pharmacies.
David Cameron will be receiving the biggest petition on any healthcare issue in history today.
More than 1.7 million people have declared their opposition to the Government’s plans to cut £170 million from the community pharmacy budget.
The unwarranted and unjust cutback could, according to the Government’s own figures, result in the closure of up to 3,000 local chemists – a quarter of all those in the country – and deal a hammer blow to their frontline role in healthcare.
I’m part of the cross-party campaign that has joined forces with patients and pharmacists to deliver that petition to Downing Street to make sure their voice is heard.
The Government say these huge cuts are needed to deal with the “clustering” of pharmacies in certain areas.
But this is utter rubbish. The Government has admitted - in response to my Parliamentary Question - that they have no idea how many pharmacies will be forced to close or what impact it will have on the High Street.
But Ministers are still prepared to risk ending the key role of thousands of pharmacies in dispensing medicine and offering free advice to patients before they need to see a doctor or go to hospital.
The closures will mean that thousands of people, many of them elderly and frail, will face a far longer walk or difficult journeys on public transport to reach their nearest pharmacy.
The Government’s cut will be a disaster for community healthcare and pile more pressure on our already overstretched GPs and hospital A&E units.
Many of these closure-threatened pharmacies are in deprived areas where there is the greatest need for what they offer.
Research from YouGov released this week shows that in deprived areas, four in five patients would make an appointment with their GP if their local pharmacy closed.
That's why these cuts to community pharmacies could turn out to be a false economy. Ministers might think they are saving a few quid closing down chemists, but all they'll do is ending up costing the NHS more as people end up queuing at the GP surgery or the local hospital. And of course community pharmacies do so much to improve public health - which saves the NHS money in the long run.
So that’s why I’m leading a Commons debate when I will call on the Government to urgently rethink these cuts.
At a time when the NHS is in crisis and struggling with rocketing waiting times at hospital A&E units and almost intolerable pressure on GPs’ surgeries, the part played in community healthcare by pharmacies is more important than ever.
Figures from the Health and Social Care Information Centre show that the number of prescriptions dispensed has risen by 50 per cent since 2005 - with more than a billion items dispensed in the community last year.
The average person makes 14 visits a year to one of England’s 11,500 pharmacies.
People don’t want to see pharmacies forced to shut through a counter-productive, misjudged budget cut.
As the massive petition delivered to Downing Street shows, their services are valued by the public more than ever. It's time Ministers started valuing them too - and listened to the public.
Michael Dugher MP is the Labour MP for Barnsley East and a former member of the shadow cabinet.
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