After 30 years in community pharmacy, how do you view the current situation?
When I joined Weldricks, margins and stability across our range of activities - from dispensing to retailing to our work on procurement - were sufficient to invest back in the business, build stability, and plan and invest for the future. We also had a professional fee for the professional community pharmacy services we provided to the NHS. That is completely absent now.
I have a deep angst over how we are being failed completely by our non-proportional and therefore non-representative negotiator, Community Pharmacy England (CPE), who we are not allowed to challenge, or change.
To be in this current situation, almost one whole year out of contract with the NHS after a distressing seven-year period, where CPE has allowed us to be ravaged by inflation, is not the treatment we expected when we toiled, innovated and put ourselves at personal risk on the front line during the pandemic.
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This is just a shocking and deeply shameful way to treat the professional and vocational people who have devoted their lives, and their family’s security, to the NHS, their local communities, and community pharmacy.
Now, we are having to survive with no margin left at all after operating costs, less than a deep discount retailer makes, and unlike them we do not have their freedom to choose what to buy and sell, who to, and for how much. We are caught in a trap of the making of our monopolistic customer - the NHS - and the ineptitude of our negotiator.
If our health service truly thinks it can run its front-line pharmacy services on the economics of a pound shop, then its leaders need to check their own conscience and sanity.
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Look at just the headline events over the last seven years. Lloydspharmacy walked away from the UK high street leaving a huge trail of debts. Phoenix, a well-run business, has lost a small fortune in cash and assets. Beneath that, many family-owned pharmacies are now in negative equity. Every week, local community pharmacies whose owners have put their life into that business, with that pharmacy as their pension, are closing.
When pharmacy became a private contractor to the NHS decades ago, part of the understanding was that fair remuneration and goodwill values would self-fund income and pensions, so the NHS did not carry the burden of pharmacies' salaries and pensions. That agreement is in flagrant breach. Community pharmacy contractors are increasingly in personal debt from their careers of providing services to the NHS.
Where are we headed to on this current trajectory? What will replace community pharmacies that close, distance selling pharmacies?
DSPs are great if you are in your early years, if you don’t get seriously ill, if when you have a question or complaint you don’t mind being taken through a maze of unhelpful “help lines”.
Great too if you don’t mind your prescription disappearing in the post or just being lost by a courier. However, treating patients as online commodity customers, where compliance to medicines regimes and their general health cannot be checked in person by trained and caring staff in the community, is not safe for the elderly, the confused, the terminally ill or anyone vulnerable.
Hubs are going to be another magic solution according to some sooths. Well, let me tell them as someone who has developed and run a hub for over 14 years, and which is one of the highest volume pharmacies in the country, hubs create as many problems as they solve.
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The thought that you can cover the country in them and have bricks-and-mortar pharmacies as some pristine clinical outlet for professional services is an un-evidenced pipe dream.
Where is the economic modelling that offers evidence that the government is prepared to pay us enough money to deliver professional services to replace most of the income that is generated by volume dispensing, which pays those operating costs. Or to give us enough margin on dispensing so both the hub and the spoke can generate enough income to pay their respective operating costs?
How can we trust CPE to negotiate these numbers when it has made such a hash of simple cost-plus mathematics on purchasing?
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Is there enough belief in trust and transparency to allow a third-party hub to do your purchasing and share the income honestly and fairly? My 30 years firmly tells me not.
Where is the evidence that our lethargic regulator will startle us all and spring into life to help us remove the many outdated practices and legislatory bottlenecks that mire robotic dispensing in pointless inefficiency?
If politicians accept that unevidenced pipe dreams of DSPs and hubs are going to be the future basis for their constituents to access the healthcare services that bricks-and-mortar community pharmacies now provide them, then woe betide themselves when they become elderly, confused, terminally ill or vulnerable.
How has the role you play changed over the years?
Clearly community pharmacy now is a very different thing than in 1993 when I joined Weldricks. We had 16 pharmacies over a larger geographical area than the spread of our 60 branches today.
Ron Alcock, the owner, was personally involved in all aspects of the business. I, as someone who had trained and learned management in a multi-national corporate environment, was immediately struck by the bravery of the huge personal financial risks Ron had taken while growing the group rapidly from a single pharmacy.
He was a doting father with seven children and had borrowed the maximum amount he could from the banks to build up the group of pharmacies from the legacy his grandmother had left - a single pharmacy she owned from the 1930s.
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The worst that could happen to me if I failed was to be sacked and then use the experiences to move on to my next role. But Ron faced personal and familial ruin for failure.
This was so inspirational to me that I decided to join him without a contract of employment. I told him if he didn’t like what I did, to tell me, and I would just go. We didn’t always see eye to eye, but we never reached the point where he told me to head for the exit.
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Working with a family-owned business is a journey through generations, so eventually I was helping with the handover of the business from the father to his son Christopher, the current MD and chair. The continuity of working for the son of the father and developing another deep-rooted relationship is unique, and not something that the corporate world can give to you, because family shareholders are not just there for the short term but for multiple generations.
Unlike the corporate world, where the goals are usually how much can they make in the shortest possible time, family business owners usually live in the community their business serves so when a customer complains they do not complain to a faceless and impotent call centre, or to a depressingly circuitous online “help bot”. They can complain directly to the family, and the family will care enough to want to know from me what went wrong, and why.
What’s the future for Weldricks?
The management team of Weldricks is a long-term evolution in the same way the shareholders evolve as the family grows.
We have a mix. Some managers who have spent their lifetime with the company, and some who have joined us bringing outside experiences with them. They have bonded together as a well-rounded team.
Developing and retaining key staff is a process involving communication, personal development plans and key performance indicators, so everyone in the team can see their journey and the mile-posts along it and have mutual respect for each other’s commitment and achievements.
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Once they have achieved a high level of capability and competence it is important not to over-manage them but give them freedom to continue to grow and test their capabilities.
Part of that process is where I currently am, taking another step back to allow the space that the team needs to continue to develop and test themselves as managers.
How can family businesses transfer into large organisational structures while remaining dynamic?
While dealing with the day-to-day issues of business as usual I have always been aware that when I am gone, I must leave behind a management structure that will be there to support the family through this generation into the next and that is capable of dealing with whatever new challenges the future might bring.
I have been blessed with a like-minded group of management colleagues that share my vision of doing the right things in the right way for the right reasons. That is why our online pharmacy, which competes nationally with the big names, is constantly in among the highest rankings on customer review sites.
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We simply try to aim at and surpass whatever the highest standards of any competitors are and be accountable - and learn from customer criticisms.
We are not the biggest or the best, but we always try to do the best we can. We always inquest our failures and admit and learn from our mistakes.
We are all aware that no business has a right to exist, that we must work hard to maintain that existence, look around us for threats and opportunities, try to read the future and evolve continually to keep our business relevant for that future. We try to get our colleagues at all levels to understand what we are doing and why - and try to work together on a daily mission for survival and improvement.
