Pharmacy closures in England: our recent findings

Pharmacists play a crucial role in delivering care by offering advice on a range of illnesses, providing information about medicines and promoting disease prevention by administering vaccines and conducting health screening.

The Pharmacy First scheme which was launched in January 2024 plays a central part in the delivery of community healthcare. It enables community pharmacies to offer people free consultations for seven common conditions to relieve pressure on GP practices.

How did we carry out this research?

Healthwatch England sent a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to all 42 Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) to gather the number and reasons for the closures of permanent and temporary pharmacies in England between 1 January 2023 and 31 December 2023. This time period marked a full calendar year before the launch of the Pharmacy First service.

What did we find?

All 42 ICBs provided some data on permanent and temporary closures as well as the reasons behind temporary closures. The data reveals that the North West London ICB has been coping well with pressures with 212 total hours of temporary closures, making it the best-performing ICB on this measure. Yet, temporary closures remain an issue because they undermine the benefits of Pharmacy First.

The leading cause of temporary closures in every instance is related to staffing, and in particular, the ability to find a locum pharmacist. This may explain why more rural ICBs tend to have higher hours of closure per pharmacy, and the London ICBs perform so well.

There is also a correlation between population age and temporary pharmacy closures; areas with older populations tended to lose more hours to temporary pharmacy closures. This highlights that older people, who are most likely to use pharmacy services, may be the least well served when it comes to accessing them.

Expanding the role of pharmacy is seen as one of the ways to address the challenge of unequal care access and so this issue should be prioritised by decision makers.

Our briefing provides more details about our research findings. 

What are we calling for?

1. Patients to be better notified of pharmacy closures, and for pharmacy teams to be supported by improved contingency plans.

NHS England and Integrated Care Boards should support pharmacy teams to give appropriate notice and advice to the public wherever possible. This could be through the NHS App, NHS website, SMS platforms, and local GP and pharmacy websites – providing real time information on temporary closures. 

ICBs should also analyse and publish monthly figures on the number of temporary closures to inform workforce planning, spot trends in postcode variations, and tackle persistent closures using agreed local hours plans. Data should be reported in a standardised form to help better inform national planning pharmacy services. 

2. A national evaluation to consider issues facing pharmacy, including workforce, funding, data, and estates.

NHS England should commission a formal evaluation of the challenges facing the pharmacy sector. This evaluation should specifically examine pharmacy workforce planning to ensure that both the size and distribution of the pharmacy workforce is optimally geared towards ensuring equal access to services and expanding pharmacy’s care offer.