What a Friday feeling! Waking up a couple of weeks ago to the IT outage and feeling like the day was going to feel like March 2020. That dreaded feeling of having to go into work, knowing what the day ahead would be like.

I shook myself and told myself maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

Reader, I was wrong. As usual, community pharmacy was the sector that picked up the pieces for patients who couldn’t get through to anyone else.

Read more: ‘Going round in circles’: Pharmacy First consultations halted by IT crash

When it works IT is brilliant and saves so much time creating so many efficiencies. But when it goes wrong, it feels like we take 1,000 steps backwards with many of us forgetting what we did pre-IT.

Things years ago things seemed so much simpler, but perhaps it’s patient’s expectations that have changed, and that is proving harder to manage?

Following the election results, seeing a new party in power gave me some hope that there would be change. Wes Streeting as the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and a new pharmacy minister. But as we approach the summer holiday period and we have only just seen an MP in a community pharmacy, I’m not so sure that community pharmacy will much change, anytime soon.

The NPA has announced a second day of action for September. GP’s have voted on a “work to rule” regime. Which of those two activities will have the most impact? It will be interesting to see, though I suspect I already know the answer.

Read more: NPA petition hits 300,000 signatures

The junior doctors have just been given a 22% pay rise whereas Community Pharmacy is having their reimbursement for medication reduced by £9m per month. When will Community Pharmacy have parity with other healthcare sectors? I see this week that CPE has announced it is using a consulting company to advise on negotiations. This was mentioned in the Wright Review so it’s good to see that this is happening.

I do wonder if we never get anywhere because community pharmacy doesn’t stick together. We always talk about not offering free services, but would we ever agree to work to rule like the GP’s are? I’m not sure that we would.

The NPA campaign is something we can do to get attention about the lack of fair funding without impacting patients in any way and we can’t even get everyone to agree on that.

Locally in my area I see pharmacies fighting for every item by switching EPS nominations, offering free delivery, not charging for emergency supplies, ordering prescriptions and chasing them on behalf of patients. We have been talking for many years now about not doing anything for free, yet we all do.

Read more: CPE calls on new Labour government to add more services to Pharmacy First

We know that services are the way forward and items are loss making (even more so now with the recent reimbursement information) yet pharmacy owners are still obsessed with growing their item numbers. Too many pharmacies are missing out on easy services such as NMS and more recently I have heard that many pharmacies don’t always claim for services or check that they have been paid correctly for them.

We need a complete overhaul in community pharmacy, and we need this overnight. We need everyone to work together. And with a new government, now is the time to state clearly what we want and by when. Until that happens, I’m afraid I believe that this same article will be valid in 12 months’ time. I hope that I’m wrong.