Editor’s view: Opportunity knocks for pharmacy?

Moving from opposition to Government comes with growing pains, Paul Ryan, a former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, once said – “because doing big things is hard”. Fixing a “broken” NHS, in the words of Wes Streeting, is arguably the biggest challenge facing Sir Keir Starmer’s new administration.

There are no easy solutions. It will be hard and probably very painful. Neither will it be quick – which is perhaps why, rather anticlimactically, a Mental Health Bill and Rishi Sunak’s smoking ban were the only pieces of health legislation mentioned in the King’s Speech delivered on July 17. After all, Labour has had just the 14 years to come up with a plan...

Cutting waiting lists and resolving the junior doctor strikes are the immediate priorities – the dentists have already popped into Whitehall for a quick chat – but where does pharmacy fit in?

In opposition, Streeting could not have been more positive. He told Sigma’s conference in February that community pharmacies were “critical” to Labour’s mission of reforming the NHS. It was “unacceptable” that the network had been allowed to decline as a result of the funding squeeze, with pharmacy closures disproportionately affecting the communities that needed them most, accompanied by reduced hours, services and staff numbers elsewhere.

So a groaning in-tray for the new pharmacy minister, Stephen Kinnock, who as the MP for Aberafan Maesteg in Wales, with no experience of the health brief in opposition, is an interesting appointment in itself.

Leading pharmacy organisations were quick off the mark with a joint letter to the new health secretary calling for “urgent, fair funding” to safeguard access to medicines. However, desperately needed as new money is, the sector must not only hold out the begging bowl but come up with bold solutions to the Government’s healthcare challenges.

Everything should be on the table, whether it’s changing patient behaviours and shifting demand through an expanded Pharmacy First offer, keeping people healthy with targetted prevention initiatives or finally making a sustained effort to optimise patients’ use of medicines. Perhaps this is where the much trailed community pharmacist prescribing service might come in.

It goes without saying – but I’ll say it anyway – that all this should be properly remunerated.

It has been said that pharmacy tends to do better under a Labour Government. That may or may not be the case but with Alan Milburn, Lord Darzi and Paul Corrigan advising Wes Streeting, it looks like we will see a return to Blair-era health policy, which did include two progressive pharmacy white papers. 

That said, negotiations on a new funding deal for this year are not expected to begin for weeks… which could be too late for some cash-strapped contractors and a sector in financial meltdown.