r/Glasgow Tools

For starters, I work for a large pharmacy chain and given the high street footprint of my company, it's probably the same one as the posters above and the one that you've had a problem with. From what I can see, the root cause of your frustration is a misunderstanding of the relationship between community pharmacy and GP practices.

I work in what is normally one of the busiest pharmacies in Scotland right in the heart of the city centre with the majority of my patients come from the offices nearby. Those workers are for obvious reasons staying at home, so when they need a prescription done, they're phoning their GP and having it sent to a pharmacy more local to them. The thousands of patients that I normally provide for (and have the experience and staffing levels to provide for) are now dispersed and mobbing smaller, local pharmacies in Greater Glasgow and indeed, places like East Kilbride.

Secondly, think of how stores receive prescriptions. A minority are handed in by the patient and during this difficult time we are seeing this less and less as GP's aren't allowing patients into their buildings and instead are relying on other, existing methods of getting a script to us. That may be via post as all pharmacies rely on, or as my store uses extensively; a prescription courier service - i.e for surgeries that you have a lot of patients with, a driver will visit those surgeries every day, collect all available scripts and deliver them to store the following day. This allows the GP to get a script to the pharmacy faster than using the post and without the cost or risk of the script going missing in the mail. The pharmacy has no control over the volume of scripts that arrive every day via post or courier and this is where the bulk of workload comes from. Many small pharmacies, whilst coping with staff shortages are having to deal with a the flood of prescriptions that my store is used to seeing and as such, are needing to open late/close early/close over lunch to blast through the workload.

Lastly, you seem to have inferred at one point that the manager of the store that's put a bee in your bonnet might be somehow requesting extra prescriptions for monetary gain and that this is the reason for the discrepancy in wait times. This is categorically untrue - the pharmacy have no control over where the patient wants their script sent and given the poor state of the NHS contract there's no incentive to do more. Yes, pharmacies are reimbursed for every item that they dispense which causes stores to aim to lock in as may patients as possible with repeat prescription services. However due to how heavily those payments have been cut over the last decade, once you take away the cost of dispensing those items, there's almost no profit left. It's actually worse down in England where it's not uncommon to be dispensing at a loss. That's why Boots' profits are plummeting and why Lloyds and M&D Greens made heavy losses last year. Hopefully that clears things up.