Verwood Pharmacy

25/12/2024

We’d like to wish all our staff and customers a very Merry Christmas 🎄🧑‍🎄 🥂

23/12/2024

We will be closed on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s day. Otherwise, we are open 8am - 8pm Mon to Fri and 9am - 4pm Sat as usual over the festive period.

15/09/2024

We’re very excited to announce our biggest planned enhancement for 2024 will be happening next week, changing our Patient Medication Record system to Pharmacy X.

Our brand new premises were designed around Pharmacy X’s workflow, and we have been waiting ever since for NHS England accreditation of the system (it has been running in Wales for several years). It will provide a faster, safer, more efficient process for our team, with better tracking of your orders and prescriptions, as well as integrating with our Medpoint collection machine, making this process smoother. The system will send patients notifications of when items are ready to collect directly from the pharmacy - this will be the accurate way of knowing when your items are ready, so please only consider this over any notifications you may receive from other parties.

As with any new system, please bear with us next week as the team adjust. We’ll soon be up to full-speed and able to offer all our customers an improved and widened variety of services on top of Pharmacy First, thanks to the benefits Pharmacy X offers.

19/07/2024

We are aware of the current global IT issues going on, that as BBC News have reported are affecting some pharmacies and other healthcare services.

At the moment, we are pleased to report that Verwood Pharmacy is unaffected and operating as normal. However, please bear with us if any related impacts do occur today.

25/06/2024

Our phone migration has happened slightly earlier than expected, but has completed successfully and our phone is working again now.

24/06/2024

A brief update on our earlier post regarding downtime of our phone system on 25th June.

We have been informed this will be between 16:00 and 20:00 for 30 mins to 1 hour. Obviously these things are a bit out of our hands and subject to change.

24/06/2024

Having invested heavily in our infrastructure last year, this year we are focusing on improvements to our systems. Stage 1 of this was our new patient app and website in partnership with Healthera, which some of you are already using. We continue to work with Healthera to improve this.

Stage 2 will be an enhancement to our phone systems, with benefits like call queuing (no more guessing when the line will be free), clear notifications when we are closed and other facilities allowing future enhancements.

In preparation for this, our phone line is due to be switching providers at some point tomorrow, Tuesday 25th June. Our number will not be changing, but there may be some downtime during the switch. Apologies in advance for any inconvenience caused by this.

20/06/2024

Lights Out! Our support for the NPA’s Day of Action: One day to begins now.

Our lights will be out until 11am. But what if this wasn’t just for awareness. What if the lights go out permanently, not just here, but in pharmacies in towns and communities across the country. That is what is already happening, and why it is so important to raise awareness about these key services and the impacts the funding drain is having.

19/06/2024

Tomorrow, we will be taking part in the National Pharmacy Association's Day of Action: One day to .

Community Pharmacies are close to breaking point. Our lights will be switched off between 9am and 11am, giving a visual indication of what it would mean to the communities to lose this precious resource.

Since 2015, pharmacy funding has been cut in real terms by at least 30%. In that time, over 1,300 pharmacies have permanently closed.
https://saveourpharmacies.co.uk

Drug prices are fluctuating hugely and the NHS is slow to react, meaning we make losses on many common prescription items on a daily basis. Shortages with medicine supplies to the UK are not being adequately addressed, meaning patients go short. and we spend huge amounts of time trying to chase supplies and deal with owings. Services that patients have come to rely on from their pharmacies like deliveries, monitored dosage systems etc all receive no funding, and on top of the other cuts, pharmacies have been left with no choice but to stop or reduce these, or introduce fees. Delivery alone, we have spent approximately £500,000 on providing over the last decade or so, at our own expense.

Prescription charges keep increasing, but none of this is retained by the pharmacy (even though we have to pay for credit card processing fees etc from this) - it's felt reasonable to increase these hidden patient taxes on an annual basis due to inflation etc, but at the same time pharmacy funding is frozen for 5 years. Increasingly, services are being pushed to pharmacies, but inadequate funding and no support for staff costs or training, means it's not sustainable for community pharmacies in the longer-term, no matter how hard we try.

In this election cycle, remember to consider this important and often forgotten sector of the healthcare system. What are your chosen parties and candidates proposing to do to address the gaps in pharmacy funding?

We are adding our voices to this cry for help from the sector as a whole. This is not a post supporting any particular political party, it is a situation that has been developing over many governments. However, this is a situation that needs to be changed NOW, by whoever forms the next government! , before it's too late!

28/03/2024

We will be closed on Good Friday and Easter Monday, but open as usual until 8pm tonight and from 9am - 4pm on Saturday.

11/01/2024

We’d like to thank for their excellent documentary on the pharmacy crisis. Missed it? Catch it again on ITVX.

EVERYTHING they outlined is happening in EVERY pharmacy in England, including those here in Verwood. Lloyds, the biggest pure pharmacy chain in the country, voluntarily exited every store they own - imagine, that is the equivalent of Tesco or Sainsbury’s deciding their supermarkets are no longer viable. That says it all.

Pharmacy First is a step in the right direction, but it is not enough to reverse 10 years of real terms cuts. Where is the funding for another (well deserved and needed) huge hike in the minimum wage, that pharmacies cannot afford because our contract with the NHS, that is over 90% of pharmacy incomes, has been frozen for 5 years? Where is the support for medicines shortages and the huge losses we make on many prescriptions because the NHS is so slow to react to volatile prices. Hopefully, this will be the spark to move towards the much better funded models in Wales and Scotland, where the support is available for us to help you.

11/01/2024

On ITV1 today at 8:30pm, the Tonight show tackles some of the many problems currently affecting the community Pharmacy industry and how the government's shameful lack of funding for the sector has led to an estimated average of 8 pharmacies a week closing down:

Paul Brand asks are our pharmacies facing a crisis? It's estimated on average eight are closing every week and they're at their lowest number since 2015. | ITV National News