Ever feel like you’re pushing water uphill? If your working day in community pharmacy feels relentless, you’re certainly not alone. 

When this module was first written more than five years ago, the challenges were gloomy news from the high street, a depressed economy and reduced consumer confidence. Those pressures are still there – if anything, the last 18 months have hastened the shift away from traditional retail to online, while the pandemic has exacerbated the financial challenges in primary care by adding costs and complexity. 

There may be a bounceback on in the economy at large, but for community pharmacy, income from prescriptions continues to decline and replacement income from services is, in some parts of the UK, patchy to say the least. Add to that the challenges faced by businesses caused by staff shortages due to Covid-19 isolation, and now the backlog of holiday entitlement that has built up over the last 18 months as pharmacy teams have kept going week in, week out.

It’s a situation tailor made for low morale (and its toxic consequences) to thrive.