Thousands face five-mile trip to buy medicine

NEARLY 300,000 people, many of whom are elderly and live in rural areas, will have to travel five miles or more to collect their medicines because of a government subsidy cut.

A study by the House of Commons library laid bare how much further the sick will have to travel if pharmacies close as a result of cuts to subsidies.

Campaigners will today start a challenge in the High Court against the cuts. Ministers said last autumn the subsidy for pharmacies in rural and deprived areas would be cut by £208 million in the 2017-18 financial year.

Up to 3,000 pharmacies in England are threatened with closure, campaigners said.

The Commons library found that about 1.3 million people – one in 40 of the population of England – will have to travel further to get their medicines. It said that an extra 70,000 will have to travel more than five miles to get to their nearest pharmacy.

Worst affected would be Appleby-in-Westmoreland in Cumbria, where residents face an extra nine-mile jour- ney to get medicines. Around 920,000 people will have to walk between one and 2.5 miles further to a pharmacy if their local outlet shut. A further 297,384 people would have to travel between 2.5 and five miles.

Mike Dugher, the former Labour frontbencher, said: “The Government needs to urgently rethink these cuts.

“Community pharmacies are vital to supporting public health and preventing people needing to see a GP or visit hospital. These cuts will have a disproportionate effect on rural communities.”

Stephen Fishwick, of the National Pharmacies Association which is backing the legal action, said a fund to help the hardest-hit chemists was not enough. He said: “The funding put in place to maintain access to pharmaceutical care in rural areas is a temporary fix – a sticking plaster to cover a gaping wound.”