New Zealand’s community pharmacy sector is now stretched to breaking point. Over the last four decades I’ve witnessed a slow, deliberate destruction of the community pharmacy network that was built on trust and service.
Stagnant funding, wall-to-wall compliance, and workforce shortages only tell half the tale. Creeping corporatisation – the spread of big-box, retail-focused chains with shareholder returns as the only objective – has steadily undermined the core values of pharmacy care.
The problems we face
• Funding and Complexity: The prescription payment model is a bureaucratic maze, propped up by dispensing volumes when the future must reward clinical service, patient outcomes, and advice. Legislative changes such as funding caps, emailed prescriptions, patient co-payments and now the move towards 12‑month scripts have all adversely affected compensation, leaving many owner-operators struggling to survive.
• Burnout and staff shortages: Independent pharmacies face impossible odds: low wages, rising costs, workforce shortages, locum expenses, and constant policy churn. Stress levels are high, morale is low, quality is threatened, and we are dangerously close to seeing closures which will spread like a virus across the community pharmacy network.
• Creeping corporatisation: Let’s not sugarcoat this, corporate chains are diluting the pool of experienced pharmacists, shifting the focus to retail margins, and eroding our ability to provide local, relationship-based healthcare. Decisions that once served communities now serve shareholders, and care is losing its personal touch.
How community pharmacy can fight back
Here’s the opportunity: community pharmacists must band together and push back. By forcefully and collectively reasserting the value of quality care, we can demand policy and funding reforms that recognise the true value owner-operated pharmacies deliver.
• Champion funding reform: It’s time to scrap the current dispensing payment structure and demand a simple, transparent model that rewards actual health outcomes. Clinical services, minor ailments consultations, and medicine management and advice must all be funded properly, with clear and predictable claims and payments. Make complexity the enemy.
• Insist on minor ailments funding: We need a national minor ailments programme that is fully funded to allow community pharmacists to treat infections, rashes, children’s illnesses and more. There is plenty of evidence that pharmacies can relieve pressure from overloaded GPs and hospitals and deliver real savings for the health system.
• Protect independent ownership: The sector must unite to keep strict pharmacist-only ownership laws. By fighting for locally owned and operated pharmacies we will protect community ties and ensure corporatisation doesn’t turn pharmacy into just another overseas-owned big-business sector.
• Invest in workforce and wellbeing: Community pharmacy must address pay parity with other health professionals while also rewarding pharmacy ownership as a career pathway. A properly funded sector will invest more in employees because quality care starts with a supported, motivated team.
• Sector-led contract reform: Don’t sit back. We must all push for contracts that promote the professional capabilities of pharmacists and reward what matters – high quality medicines and advice for our communities. Together we must insist on transparency in every part of the remuneration model and in every negotiation.
A positive future
The answer is clear: community pharmacies can reclaim their place at the centre of New Zealand healthcare by standing together.
We must demand the systems, funding, and ownership models that protect and reward what we do best. We’re not just dispensers, we’re clinical experts, health coaches, medicines managers, and local health leaders.
It’s time to start fighting back for a sector where quality provision, patient-centred care, and local ownership aren’t just possible, they’re preferable. That’s the future worth building.
John Saywell
The Independent Pharmacy Group
RPM Retail
