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By P3pharmacy editor Arthur Walsh

At the top of the year, I spoke with a hard-working pharmacy owner from Kent who had made the difficult decision to exit his NHS contract. 

The sums just weren’t adding up, Faversham’s Temitope Awofeso told me as he painted a bleak picture of soaring business costs, inadequate drugs reimbursement and having to let go of loyal employees – a familiar story for many of our readers. 

At the time, he was semi-hopeful that a new contractual settlement for England’s pharmacies might help turn things around. He planned to focus on private services and try to resume his NHS contract if and when things started to look up.

But despite the funding uplift announced in the spring, by September the writing was on the wall for Temi. The local NHS had refused his application to rejoin the pharmaceutical list, and his private business wasn’t covering his ever-increasing overheads.

He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t – the pharmacy would have to close.

“What makes this particularly painful is that our pharmacy was recently nominated for a Best Pharmacy award – recognition we could not pursue because we had already made the decision to close,” he told me.

Temi’s decision was made in the same week the government pledged £1.5 billion to help Jaguar Land Rover recover from a cyber-attack, which to him captured the relative lack of attention pharmacy gets from policymakers. “We weren’t even granted the small flu jab uplift that was recommended,” he noted.

Temi’s name appears in a recent Community Pharmacy England report full of troubling findings about the daily pressures on pharmacy teams and the resulting impact on their wellbeing. “The toll on my mental health was enormous as I struggled to come to terms with closing my pharmacy,” he said.

“But I feel it is important to give my voice to this issue, for what so many of us endure in silence,” Temi went on to say, adding: “If my experience can help strengthen the case for real reform and sustainable funding, then at least some good can come from what has happened.”

His is just one of many voices sharing the same dire warning. And his determination to draw on his sad experiences to try and influence a better future for his colleagues is a perfect example of the decency and selflessness that pharmacy workers demonstrate every day.

At the time of writing, it is not clear that Labour will be willing to cough up the money needed to plug the hole, estimated by some to be over £2 billion. We can only hope it sees sense and invests in a sector perfectly suited to its NHS reform plans, and prevents Temi’s story being repeated a thousand times over.