The Background - Leases, Acquisitions and Relocations

As most residents will be aware, we needed to vacate Verwood Pharmacy's prior premises at Lake Road Surgery by the 30th June 2023 due to the expiry of our lease, and subsequently began the process of securing and renovating the old Lloyds Bank site at Bank Court, 10 Manor Road as our new home, planning to open there on the 23rd June, and ensure continuity of service.

At a similar time, we discovered that Lloyds Pharmacy were divesting their store in Station Road and we wanted to continue supporting their staff and customers, as most are Verwood Residents like us, so we began steps to acquire and run their operation in parallel.

Part of the process of moving a pharmacy premises involves an application to relocate the NHS contract, which we duly applied for in December 2022. Sadly, despite delivering on all our targets against tight timelines to open the Bank Court site on time, we found out from the NHS just a few days before we were due to move (and well over their 4-month decision deadline) that they had rejected our relocation application, ostensibly due to patient convenience. This was despite it being clear that we had no lease to continue trading at Lake Road and would otherwise have to close the pharmacy, which was substantially more inconvenient for patients than any relocation could have been. The NHS also made a mistake on their measurement of the distance between the two sites, despite the correct distance being provided on our submission, which was of great detriment as it potentially changed the 'no significant change' classification of the application and hence affected the decision.
 
Despite the mistake, the only option open to us was the standard appeal process, which takes several months and would have been far too late given the imminent expiry of the lease. Nevertheless, the good news was that in the meantime we had completed our purchase of the Station Road site, taking over the NHS contract there. This allowed us to move to Bank Court as planned, but with NHS patients needing to choose to renominate their pharmacy to the Station Road site if they wished to stay with us. Since this time, we have been operating the Bank Court site as a non-NHS 'hub' that does almost all of the dispensing work, whilst the Station Road 'spoke' essentially became an NHS prescription collection point in a 'hub and spoke' model.

Whilst this has been working, it of course introduced a number of operational difficulties. Not least of which, is that patients have been unable to collect NHS prescriptions from our brand new Bank Court premises, which were designed to be able to provide the required prescription volumes needed in Verwood.