A health watchdog said that relatively few people had shared their views on access to pharmacies across Brighton and Hove and the services that they provide.
Healthwatch Brighton and Hove chief executive Alan Boyd asked about the low response rate as politicians and officials discussed a draft “pharmaceutical needs assessment” for the area.
A total of 358 people responded to a public engagement exercise – and a 60-day consultation, ending on Sunday (27 July), attracted just half a dozen comments.
Mr Boyd said that the figures were too low when Brighton and Hove City Council’s Health and Wellbeing Board discussed the needs assessment at Hove Town Hall on Tuesday (22 July). He also asked whether enough views had been captured.
Public health consultant Katy Harker said that a larger response would have been preferred, adding that the survey had been sent to community groups and there had been a poster campaign.
She said: “We did push it as much as we could. We had paper copies in case there were people who felt they didn’t want to access it digitally.
“We sent it out to various community groups and we went along to a lot of health events with paper copies and QR codes linked to the survey.”
The board is required to carry out a pharmaceutical needs assessment every three years, with chemists continuing to close – nationally and locally – as costs rise and recruitment proves harder.
The draft pharmaceutical needs assessment said that there were 51 community pharmacies in Brighton and Hove, down from 53 in 2022. Nationally, the number fell 5 per cent in the same period.
The assessment said that pharmacy services were “well distributed” in Brighton and Hove, with no gaps identified.
It said that the city had 18.2 pharmacies for every 100,000 people – a slightly higher proportion than the England average of 18.1.
Everyone with access to a car could reach a pharmacy within 10 minutes – and 98 per cent of people were within a 20-minute walk of a pharmacy although for some people that would be a struggle.
Some 35 per cent of pharmacies stayed open after 6pm, the draft assessment said, although most of those closed shortly after.
And at weekends, 71 per cent of pharmacies were open on Saturdays and 8 per cent on Sundays – Asda, at Hollingbury and Brighton Marina, and Boots, in George Street, Hove, and North Street, Brighton.
NHS Sussex chair Stephen Lightfoot asked about opening times because, even though Brighton and Hove had more pharmacies than the national average, limited opening hours appeared to restricting access to services.
He was told that there was no England average for the number of hours that pharmacies were open.
The Health and Wellbeing Board was also told that, since the last assessment, advanced services had been introduced in Brighton and Hove including Pharmacy First, hypertension case-finding and flu and covid-19 jabs.
Mr Boyd praised pharmacists for treating minor ailments at weekends, saying that this helped to reduce the number of people going to the Royal Sussex County Hospital’s accident and emergency (A&E) department.
Mr Lightfoot wanted to know what could be done to increase the number of people using the Pharmacy First service to have their minor ailments treated.
Pharmacy First started in January last year. It replaced the Community Pharmacist Consultation Service to offer minor illness consultations and treatment for seven conditions.
These were middle ear infections, impetigo, infected insect bites, shingles, sinusitis, sore throat and uncomplicated urinary tract infections.
Mr Lightfoot said: “In reality, the uptake of Pharmacy First is modest in terms of spreading workload across the entire system.”
He was told that there was growing awareness among the public about the Pharmacy First programme – partly through voluntary organisations as well as resulting from more referrals from medical professionals.
The draft pharmaceutical needs assessment is available for comment on Brighton and Hove City Council’s website until the end of Sunday (27 July).
I think it’s due to the fact we are all bombarded with so many surveys and review requests from just about everywhere that it is becoming very tiresome & boring to plough through a load of heavily loaded questions from yet another survey. Everything seems to be survey driven these days which only induces increasing apathy from those people it is aimed at.
Really good point, Jules. Fatigue sets in really early. Especially when it’s a dry topic like PNA. I have professional interests in it, but for many, it’s a wordy document that’s not written for the public.
I knew nothing about it. I have email, Facebook, X Instagram. My father was a pharmacist and I would have been interested
Community Pharmacy has been in a weird place for several years. The most effective method of delivering dispensing is centralisation and robotic dispensing; there’s no contest, but that requires quite a heavy culture change to make that a new norm. Every single medium chain upwards, Boots, Lloydspharmacy one word, Well, utilises centralisation in some format these days, even our local pharmacy chains, like Kamsons.
Then you’ve got Pharmacists and Technicians, who are both registered professionals, underutilising their skills. The bread and butter of a Pharmacists job is “spot the difference”, something that can be done far quicker and more accurately through centralisation as aforementioned.
We’ve started making inroads into this, with Pharmacy First Minor Ailment Schemes, and outreach projects like Health Hub. There’s more to do, and Community Pharmacy has infamously been resistant to breaking away from previous methods – they were the last business I’m aware of that legitimately still used a fax machine, for example.
You can’t respond if you don’t know about it.
I had a survey from boots. I never use boots so how could I do a survey on their pharmacies!
Oh, I have a particular hatred of Boots, specifically, they use an extremely dated PMR system called Compass for dispensing. A system so old, it needs a separate programme to access electronic prescriptions. It’s really bad at doing lots of the basic functions. It’s also one of the most unfriendly interfaces – if you do not know the function key, there’s no way of working it out.
I used to actively avoid working at any Boots pharmacy purely because of that PMR system.