Getting proper pharmacy support? It’s all hands to the pumps…
Totnes patients who are crying out for a third pharmacy in the town are being urged to complain to the local NHS before August 10.
The Devon Integrated Care Board, which is responsible for planning health services, is one of the consultees to the county council’s Pharmacy Needs Assessment, which is looking at the next three years’ provision. Its last assessment in 2022 said there was an adequate pharmacy service, but that was before Boots closed its doors at the Leatside surgery last year.
As the Pulse has reported ( see stories here, here and here) doctors from both Leatside and Catherine House, with 19,000 patients between them, say the two existing chemists are so overwhelmed at times patients have been “avoidably harmed”. The Leatside patients’ group has gathered evidence from patients and given it all to Health Secretary Wes Streeting. Mike Mintrum, chair of the group, admits Mr Streeting will probably not read it himself – and even if he agreed with it all, he has no power to order that a third pharmacy should be opened. “We will be encouraging all our patients who are dissatisfied to contact the ICB as a matter of urgency,” he said.
Here is the email address – d-icb.patientexperience@nhs.net
He explained that if the assessment did identify a gap in service in Totnes, the county council’ s Health and Wellbeing Board, which oversees the PNA, also has no power to make one open up. They
are private businesses after all. But it can invite applications from interested parties. After Boots closed, PharmaDerma, an Okehampton based pharmacy, applied and the ICB said yes to it opening a branch at the Leatside surgery. Only for Well Pharmacy’s parent company to appeal to another bit of the NHS – NHS Resolutions, which is an ams length part of Government – against whose decisions there is no right of appeal because it was taken on behalf of the Government.
Byzantine NHS
Mike said: “It offends natural justice. We reject that argument totally, as a senior minister of the Crown must be able to overturn a decision of a Government department if it is based, as I believe,
on incorrect information.” However he is hopeful that the needs assessment will agree with him – and hundreds of GPs and patients – that two pharmacies are not enough for a growing town and its surrounding villages. If it does, a new application for a pharmacy should go through quickly, he feels.
Earlier this week Caroline Voaden MP presented a petition to the House of Commons asking the Government to prioritise the reopening of a chemist’s at Leatside surgery.
The Byzantine structure of the NHS is currently being dismantled and the alphabet soup of bodies – the Devon ICB, the HWB, even NHS England, which is being absorbed back into the health and
social care department– will be reorganised in a bid to, in Mr Streeting’s words, achieve the “biggest decentralisation of power in the history of the NHS”. Jobs are going to go as cuts in running costs of 50 per cent are being demanded from the ICB’s by this time next year. NHS Trusts, which run hospitals and which are already millions of pounds in deficit, are also having their corporate services budgets pared back.
Pharmacies rely on being paid by the NHS for much of their income and have complained that the current contract doesn’t offer many incentives to keep going. There is a concern that, as has happened with NHS dentists, there will be pharmacy deserts.