Don’t be anxious! I have the unshakeable belief that 2025 is going to deliver long awaited change and a sharp jab of positivity for the good people of community pharmacy.
How? Because as statisticians are fond of pointing out when good news feels improbable, community pharmacy is coming from a very low base.
Despite the efforts of CPE, the NPA, IPA, CCA, PDA et al, pharmacy heads into 2025 with justifiable concerns about all sorts, chief of all funding. Concrete news on a new deal was rarer than medicine in 2024, but this year is going to be completely different.
A new funding deal is on the way. That is a certainty. How it arrives, in what shape and form, and at what figure, remains in the ether, where it has sat for a year, after five years of paralysis. So given the starting point is a static nothing at all, an improvement is automatic.
Still, it won’t be nearly enough for some, because it probably won’t be, and for some it never is. And whatever the uplift figure is (mid-single? double-digit!?) given the amount of chicanery that accompanies almost all government spending, once everyone has had their calculators out, factoring in NLW rises and predicted Pharmacy First funding and so on, it will equate to something that, in the final analysis, just about keeps community pharmacy’s chin just above the water for another 12 months. Legs will be paddling furiously again.
I’d like to predict reformational change, a loosening of the grip the government has over what it insists is a private sector, and one it hasn’t yet decided is a priority, whatever it says.
Actions speak even louder than words when those words come from a politician, and the total sum of pharmacy-related action since Labour took power has been zero. Unless you count Stephen Kinnock getting a flu jab.
But wait – what if, during this last six months of government, during which time community pharmacy has been pushed to the brink of collective action, the government has been working on a package of pharmacy contract reform which would give the industry the structured, dynamic, and reassuring lift it deserves. What if?
I fear a 12-month 5-7% bolt-on to existing measures might be more likely. But I sincerely hope that turns out to be the lousiest prediction of a happy new year.
