Pharmacy minister Stephen Kinnock yesterday (March 25) said that the National Pharmacy Association’s (NPA) call for its 6,000 member pharmacies in England to take part in collective action from April 1 is “unnecessary”.
“I think that the collective action that it is taking is premature, unnecessary and detrimental to community pharmacy patients,” he said during a House of Commons debate.
“I urge the NPA to reconsider its position and wait for the outcome of our negotiations with Community Pharmacy England (CPE), which will come very shortly,” he said, adding that the new funding deal will be announced “very soon”.
Read more: Collective action: Ministers advise patients to use DSPs (and drones)
“It has taken us a while to clean up the utter mess that we inherited in community pharmacy,” Kinnock said, arguing that the NPA “would be better off waiting for the outcome” of contract negotiations.
“The government is taking industrial relations into the 21st century, as opposed to the performative nonsense that we saw for 14 years,” he added.
“Detrimental to patients”
Kinnock’s comments came in response to shadow health minister Luke Evan’s question on whether the government would “listen to calls” from the NPA and Independent Pharmacies Association (IPA) to publish the long-awaited pharmacy economic review.
The pharmacy minister accused Evans of “taking the side of the people taking collective action in a premature way that is detrimental to patients”.
Read more: NHSE refuses to publish pharmacy economic review before contract
It comes after the NPA urged members “to start the process from April 1 of reducing opening hours and services, if no new and sufficient funding is delivered” earlier this month as part of historic collective action.
If it goes ahead, it will be the first time protest action has occurred in the NPA’s 104-year history, prompted in part by “a swathe of new costs due to hit pharmacies from the start of next month”.
“Pivotal role”
Also speaking in the debate, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called on Kinnock to “join [him] in urging anyone with health worries or a family history of high blood pressure to take advantage of [the] fantastic free” pharmacy blood pressure check service.
“[Sunak] is right that a big part of the government’s shift from hospital to community is the pivotal role that community pharmacies will play in that process,” Kinnock said in response.
Read more: Collective action! Pharmacies to cut hours and services from April 1
“We are committed to the Pharmacy First model of enabling community pharmacies to do more clinical work, such as the type that he just described - that is at the heart of our 10-year plan,” he added.
Meanwhile, health minister Baroness Merron last week stressed that the core hours of pharmacies will “not be affected by the proposed action by one trade body”.
“Options are available to patients to access alternative pharmacies or distance-selling pharmacies (DSPs),” she said.
