Alex Mayer

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine. I congratulate the hon. Member for Tiverton and Minehead (Rachel Gilmour) on securing this timely debate. Community pharmacies and the people in them are the backbone of our NHS. They are a fixture on our high streets, dispensing our medicines, providing confidential, expert advice and helping people with everything from colds and tummy bugs to allergies and ear infections. Increasingly, through Pharmacy First, they are also prescribing prescription medicines without patients having to see a GP, which absolutely has to be the way to go. I am four-square behind Pharmacy First, with one small caveat: I have to say to the Minister that I think it has completely and utterly the wrong name. We could say that it does what it says on the tin: “Go to the pharmacy first.” However, to me it is a name that has been dreamed up by health insiders, not by people thinking about how patients actually see our services. When I think about going to the chemist, I think about a place where we probably pay for our prescription and maybe pick up some shampoo or, if it has suddenly started chucking it down, an umbrella. I do not think enough people will be thinking of highly trained clinical professionals who are on their doorstep. Crucially, they will not be thinking NHS. My suggestion for the Minister today is to change the name of Pharmacy First to something else, maybe “NHS+”, and to include compulsory rebranding in every contract, so that the shopfront would scream NHS. NHS means free, trusted and quality, and the plus sign would look a bit like a chemist’s anyway. A knock-on effect would be sprucing up our high streets, creating pride in place, which I know this Labour Government stand four-square behind. I would absolutely shout about it from the rooftops. Ahead of today’s debate, I went on the NHS pharmacies website to find out which of my local pharmacies provide Pharmacy First services. I am afraid that I came away none the wiser, but I did learn the seven common conditions that Pharmacy First chemists can help me with, from sore throats to shingles. Before that, I did not know that there were seven. I tried this out at a meeting of party members recently, and it turned into a terrible round of “Family Fortunes”. No one had the faintest idea what they were. We absolutely need a nationwide campaign so that people understand what services they can get from their pharmacies. If people do not know that these NHS services exist, they just will not use them. We have to stop hiding them in plain sight, and ensure that people understand what every community pharmacy already is: the NHS front door on every high street.