Pharmacies across England are struggling to serve patients due to severe financial losses and medicine shortages, meaning patients face waits of several weeks to receive critical medication.
People seeking medical advice from community pharmacists are also waiting longer as staff spend hours trying to hunt down prescription drugs.
A Community Pharmacy England survey of 2,900 pharmacies and 900 team members, found 76 per cent of pharmacies report that patients are being impacted by the pressures facing their pharmacy business.
Meanwhile, 83 per cent of pharmacies are unable to respond to patients’ phone calls and emails as promptly as usual due to the pressures they are facing, and staff in nearly two in five pharmacies (39 per cent) are unable to spend as much time supporting and advising patients as they would like.
Fin McCaul, owner of Prestwich Pharmacy in Greater Manchester, said the rising cost of medicines has also put pharmacies under pressure, with the prices of some individual drugs resulting in losses of £50 a month.
McCaul said: “The concession price for aspirin was £2.36 this month, but most of the month I’ve been buying it at £2.90. It may not seem a lot, a loss of 50p per pack, but actually when you’re [dispensing] 100 packs a month and 200 packs a month, that soon grows.”
Record numbers of price concessions, temporary adjustments to the amount pharmacies are reimbursed by the Government for medicines, have been granted month after month this year.
McCaul said his staff are spending “hours every day trying to source medicines”. And they are not the only ones.
Data from the survey shows 72 per cent of pharmacy team members said patients are affected by medicine shortages every day. There are various reasons for medicine supply issues, including shortages of raw ingredients, but pharmaceutical experts say the war in Iran has also exacerbated the issue.
McCaul, who has been a pharmacist for around 40 years, said he has “never seen it as bad as this”.
Patients are waiting days – or even weeks – for their prescriptions to be fulfilled. “The anxiety that the patient goes through and the frustrations that the patient has where they’re turning up every day to go, ‘have the tablets arrived yet?’ It’s not good for patient care.”
Pharmacists are spending hours trying to source patient medicines due to shortages (Photo: Leon Neal/Getty)A number of cardiovascular medications are in short supply, including Ramipril, which patients with high blood pressure and heart failure need to take daily.
Epilepsy patients have also experienced challenges getting the medication they need to manage seizures. Charlotte Nero, 39, from London, has been having difficulty getting hold of her life-saving epilepsy medication for weeks.
“There’s times when I’ve had to go to multiple different pharmacies to try and get the Keppra brand because if I take the generic version – which is levetiracetam, which is the main ingredient – the side effects are very different,” she said.
“I ran out of the Keppra brand the other day and I had to get the levetiracetam and the following day I spent half the day lying down because my head was thumping, I felt sick, I had really horrid headaches and then when I was able to then start using the Keppra, a lot of the side effects went away.”
Nero, a stay-at-home mother of two, said not being able to get her prescription for epilepsy medication fulfilled means she has to call on her mum to help out with childcare.
At times, she has had to ration her medication, taking a single dose instead of taking a tablet in the morning and night or even splitting a tablet in two.
Without adequate supply of her medication, Nero fears she could have an absent or tonic-clonic seizure and end up in hospital.
“You have a build-up of anxiety and stress,” she said. “A lot of seizures can be triggered by stress, lack of sleep, anxiety, and so when [those] feelings are heightened, that alone can be known to trigger seizures.”
Clare Pelham, Epilepsy Society CEO, said: “We understand how worrying it can be for patients to run low on essential medication. Epilepsy is a cliff-edge condition which means that missing even a single dose can have life-threatening consequences.
“Many people with epilepsy are also either brand dependent or need to take the same generic medication to manage their seizures. So, while it has been suggested that people can swap out their medication if there is a shortage, this isn’t an option for many people with epilepsy.
“We are calling on the Government to ensure their essential medicine supply chains are robust and water-tight so that no one is left vulnerable to global events.”
Janet Morrison, chief executive of Community Pharmacy England, said the survey results show “pharmacies are not sustainable, and that the pressures on them are directly affecting patient access to medicines and care”.
She added: “It is very troubling that pharmacies are having to reduce opening hours and introduce new charges for things that have previously been free to patients – and this goes directly against Government’s ambitions to shift more healthcare, closer to home.”
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