Support Your Local Pharmacy
Many households in the area will have received promotional letters from organisations such as Pharmacy2U who offer to handle repeat prescriptions and deliver them to your door, free of charge. While this may be a service which fits in with some peoples’ circumstances, it is also worth remembering that the local chemist is as much as part of our local economy as the bakers and newsagents. Our pharmacists rely heavily on repeat prescriptions to remain economically viable. Indeed, their role is much more than dispensing medicines, it is also about offering advice, providing emergency prescriptions and supplying the general items found in chemists. Let’s support our local pharmacies.
On a related point, the Havering Health and Wellbeing Board have launched a 60-day consultation on their draft pharmaceutical needs assessment (PNA) for the borough. The draft PNA document can be viewed HERE and a form for your comments to the consultation HERE.
The assessment provides information on what services are currently provided in the borough, what changes may occur in the future and if there are any gaps in coverage (see item above).
Your views will help inform pharmacy commissioning in Havering between 2018 – 2021.
I recieved such an invitation in an envelope bearing the NHS logo and initially I thought that this was an official initiative to make it very simple to obtain regular repeat prescriptions.
Only on further investigation did I find out that the prescriptions will NOT come from our usual Pharmacy but Amazon and my doctor, although it appeared that his surgery supported the scheme, knew nothing about it and was concerned that a valuable link and extra check in the dispensing system would be lost.
By having the income from the regular repeat prescriptions creamed off by these companies, our local pharmacists will not survive to be there for us when we want advice, to buy other items or to have emergency prescriptions dispensed for us.
Cllr Barrett is right, we must support our local Chemist or these companies will do to the chemists, what they have done to our local bookshops.
If you click on HERE for the draft document it takes you to a survey about the document. However you need to read the document before the taking part in the survey.
Now amended – thanks for picking that up!
Are there any breaches of law or regulation tgat these companies are using that could circumvent them sending such correspondence in the first place? If they are holding themselves out as being supported by the NHS and local surgeries, either directly or indirectly, it feels as though there should be a means of at least forcing them to alter the content of their communications to remove anosuch suggestions.
I love Day Lewis on Avon Road in Cranham. The staff are lovely and extremely helpful, especially the main pharmacist there, Sam.
I don’t think there are any breaches and they are approved by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of GB, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and the NHS. They were fined £130k in 2015 for selling on the names and addresses of 21,000 patients. It really is a case of supporting our local chemists or they will disappear from our communities.