Pharmacy: Closures

(asked on 16th January 2024) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many community pharmacies have closed in the last year for which data is available.


Answered by
Andrea Leadsom Portrait
Andrea Leadsom
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
This question was answered on 29th January 2024

The Department closely monitors changes to the pharmacy network to ensure access to the services the National Health Service provides. Access remains good with 80% of people in England living within 20 minutes walking from a pharmacy and twice as many pharmacies in the most deprived areas of the country.

Every three years local authorities in England undertake pharmaceutical needs assessments for their areas to ensure provision continues to meet their population’s needs.

When a local pharmacy closes, the neighbouring pharmacies usually see some increase in demand and income. Each contractor's increase is difficult to predict as patients can choose which alternative pharmacy they want to use and can use different pharmacies for different purposes. Patients can also choose to access many NHS pharmaceutical services remotely through any of the approximately 400 distance selling pharmacies (DSPs).

Statistics published by the NHS Business Services Authority show that there were 11,045 pharmacies on 1 January 2023 and 10,673 on 31 December 2023.

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