“Collective action by GPs is bound to have a ripple effect on community pharmacies,” the National Pharmacy Association (NPA) warned today (August 1).
This week (July 29), GP contractors and partners in England voted “overwhelmingly” to take protest action over the 2024/25 GP contract, which 99.2% of British Medical Association (BMA) GP and GP registrar members voted to reject back in March.
Read more: BMA asks pharmacists to ‘show support’ for GP protest action
From today, the BMA has urged protesting surgeries to take any or all of ten protest actions, including switching off GP Connect functionality, limiting “daily patient contacts per clinician” to 25 and switching “off medicines optimisation software”.
It said today that GP collective action “can carry on indefinitely if necessary”.
But now, the NPA has raised concerns that “where GP practices limit their number of daily appointments, it’s likely that more patients will come to community pharmacies”.
Read more: Pharmacies to sound alarms in unison in September protest
“However, community pharmacy’s ability to be an effective shock-absorber for disruption elsewhere in the healthcare system has been eroded by persistent underfunding,” NPA chair Nick Kaye said.
He added that “staff cuts, reduced opening hours and a wave of closures” have led to “serious capacity challenges” in the sector.
“As well as finding a resolution to the doctors’ disputes, the new government must forge a new deal with community pharmacy that funds us properly, treats us with respect and keeps our doors open to serve patients,” he said.
“Additional workload”
Meanwhile, Community Pharmacy England (CPE) chief executive Janet Morrison today stressed that “GP teams are not the only people in primary care who are exhausted, overworked and struggling to make ends meet”.
“We are asking the public to be patient and to treat pharmacy teams with respect when you are coping with additional workload from this general practice action,” she said.
“Pharmacy teams will always do their best to help patients during times of crisis – but they can only do so much,” she added.
Read more: GPs switch off update patient record function in new Pharmacy First IT twist
“They may have to prioritise the safe supply of NHS prescriptions and dealing with patients referred by NHS 111 over other NHS services,” Morrison said.
“Pharmacies are already under considerable strain as everybody in the sector is only too aware,” she added.
The doctor’s union previously asked “non-GP practice partners”, including pharmacists, to “show [their] support” for GP collective action launching this week.
Pharmacy protest?
It comes as the NPA revealed to C+D last month that pharmacies across the UK are set to sound an alarm or ring a bell in their own coordinated protest action on September 19.
This follows a “day of protest action” on June 20 where pharmacies turned their lights out and staff wore black to highlight the “emergency across the community pharmacy sector” in the UK.
Read more: Pharmacies to ‘turn out the lights’ on June 20 in ‘emergency’ protest
However, the NPA has said that it is “not currently in a position to recommend strike action” after taking “legal advice”.
Meanwhile, the pharmacy negotiator this week announced that mistakes in government calculations of Category M reimbursement mean that the sector will face clawbacks to correct an overpayment of around £9m per month.
