A large pharmacy chain just announced it is selling off (not closing) 70 out of 500 of it's pharmacies. You need to ask, why?
The company I worked for has sold off and closed a large number of pharmacies, but done it pretty secretly, so it's not got the coverage it deserves. All of the big companies have 'fulfilment centres' - giant warehouses - where they intend to do most prescriptions, with stressed out pharmacists and techs hanging around with loads of robots. Community pharmacy dispensing is a devastatingly easy set of tasks to automate in theory, it's just pharmacy is full of technophobes and change is slow. Pharmacists will still exist, the good ones will get jobs and will always get work in community, but in 10 years there will be far fewer physical pharmacies doing far fewer prescriptions and so what's going to happen, is there going to be money for other services?
Community pharmacy is reliant on NHS money or a slight change on this and you go out of business. The NHS isn't all nicey nicey, it's a rough player and gets fantastic value for money for itself, but this has very serious consequences for working conditions and pay for people that work in pharmacy. Pharmacies do loads of stuff for free, like delivery where money is just whooshing out of the till, it's completely mingbendingly bonkers. You might say yeah but you make the money in other areas - no you don't, margins are very tight. The other notable factors on poor working conditions are big chains have massive downward pressure on wages, poor unionisation, vastly too many pharmacy schools in the UK for number of jobs and a large supply of EU, Indian subcontinent and West African pharmacists that all want to work here. All of these things conspire to make poor working conditions and static/falling pay. It's mostly 'too many EU pharmacists' and 'too many pharmacy schools' it gets blamed on.
There's endless promises by the NHS about 'clinical pharmacists'. It is in my opinion a complete crock of. Since 2010 there have been 6000 independent prescribers, that sounds fantastic until you realise there are 40,000+ pharmacists on the register and this is over years to train them and constantly saying this is the future. The NHS is always saying they'll be loads of jobs for these people and apart from an announcement recently it's not backed up by anything solid.