Insight: It’s time to charge for consultations

“Can I see the pharmacist?” is the refrain repeated dozens of times a day in every pharmacy in the land. This is closely followed by: “I can’t see my GP for weeks”; “I don’t have an NHS dentist”; or “I can’t be bothered to wait in A&E”. 

My team, trying to be helpful, always say “yes” – and so my day gets eaten up by (sorry) the wrong people, who will quite happily take up half an hour of my time to ask for general health advice, or have me look at something entirely innocuous on their big toe/left arm/right eye... 

“But that’s what we’re here for!” some of you will say. Well, yes and no. Pharmacists have become the bottleneck in pharmacies as so many services require our direct presence or oversight. 

Back in 2016 when the funding cuts removed our fixed funding per pharmacy, we had to become a bit like Easyjet: everything beyond the basic service needs to be funded – and 15 minutes giving general health advice just doesn’t cut it anymore. 

Time wasting

Let me start with the lady who came in to show me some “spots” on her face, arms and legs after she had been “bitten by a spider”. After five minutes of thorough examination, I could find no evidence of said spots. “I think it’s a tapeworm”, she offered. I assured her this was very unlikely. After 20 minutes of further theories, the only thing I could do to get her to leave was to tell her to use some hydrocortisone on the so-called spots to help them go away. 

I estimate that the cost of pharmacist time at the moment is at least £1/minute with salary and on-cost (pensions, national insurance, etc). That’s without considering premises costs. So, economically, the business lost at least £25 by me seeing this patient. Not to mention the opportunity cost. I could have checked 30 prescription items, which would have earned around £60 in income – so the real loss from this 25 minutes could be as high as £85.