This is genuinely true, and – as best as I can remember – in my dream our conversation revolved around challenging the complexity of our reimbursement structure. I challenged him to manage his financial affairs on the basis of how many constituents he could get into his MP's surgery, all while his constituency boundary was being changed and his parliamentary expenses cut back and varied each month.
Mr Hunt agreed to send a minister to my pharmacy and the next thing I knew Iain Duncan Smith was sitting there. Yes, I know he's nothing to do with health, but I must have heard him on the news so he came to mind. I was explaining to him how pharmacy was still very profitable, but the drug tariff being a fiscal Gordian knot – with its varying fee structure, NCSO and price concessions, and generic categories – made budgeting difficult and investment unlikely. He agreed, and with an Alexandrian stroke said he would replace the drug tariff with a simplified payment structure.
Then the nightmare began, as the oft-repeated mantra that it is in our interest to keep the drug tariff complicated came to mind, so that despite the army of statisticians employed by the DH, it still doesn't understand where our money comes from. The next thing I know, my name is spread across the pharmacy press with pictures of "The pharmacist who sold us out to the DH".
But ah, gentle reader, "the darkness has pass'd, and it's daylight at last", with morning bringing relief that it was but a dream. But it also brought a day with a dispenser off sick, 15 MURs still to do for the month, the area team contract assessment to return by Friday, and global economic analysts AT Kearney predicting a cut in profits of up to 40 per cent.
It seems that this is only the beginning of the nightmare...
| "When you're lying awake with a dismal headache and repose is taboo'd by anxiety, I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in, without impropriety..." So goes the Lord Chancellor's nightmare song from Iolanthe – but last night that could have been me. According to a survey by NatWest Bank, 70 per cent of us dream about work. Apparently half of those work-related dreams are nightmares – most likely if you have a mentally challenging job that involves repetitive cognitive function, and high stress to perform additional activity in the midst of a disruptive environment. Sound familiar? If you speak to Mrs Xrayser, she will tell you that my dreams always have an irrational twist to them. Combine this with being an independent pharmacy owner, conscious of the naivety about pharmacy in political circles and having read last week's report on our parlous financial future, is it any wonder that I dreamt of talking to health secretary Jeremy Hunt on the phone? | |
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 Is it any wonder that I dreamt of talking to health secretary Jeremy Hunt on the phone? |
