Keith McElrea, managing director of the Welcome Pharmacy Group and of Whithorn Pharmacy, insists the entire sector in South West Scotland is close to being on its knees due to the additional pressures and stresses being placed on them.
And he says it’s mainly due to a decision by health boards to move en-mass to a pharmacotherapy model, with the creation of thousands of new pharmacist roles which are proving hard to fill.
Although agreeing it’s “the right direction of travel”, Mr McElrea says it was taken with no workforce planning, or thought towards sustainability of the community pharmacy or hospital pharmacy networks.
He said: “Even when we were screaming four or five years ago that this was already destabilising the network, that it was potentially going to break community pharmacy, the pace continued unabated, and that pace hasn’t slowed since.
“A colossal number of pharmacists have, since then, been drained out of both community and hospital pharmacy, into other, new health board roles, creating a vacuum far, far greater than the two Scottish Schools of Pharmacy could ever have been able to fill.”
Mr McElrea believes it should have been done in a more sustainable and managed way and pointed out it takes up to five years to train a pharmacist with just 700 qualifying in Scotland every year and hundreds retiring annually.
He raised his fears in a meeting with Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross and Galloway and West Dumfries MSP Finlay Carson.
Afterwards, Mr Carson said: “The views being expressed by Mr McElrea are extremely worrying, especially when he highlighted the fact that patients’ interests could suffer by an ever-changing river of staff through some pharmacies which are now running almost entirely off locum cover.
“Rural community pharmacies need additional funding in order that they can remunerate their staff better and to help prevent the drain from these frontline healthcare services into public sector roles.”
And Mr Ross said” “It was vital to hear directly from pharmacists like Keith McElrea about the significant issues facing them.”
