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Pharmacy owners are struggling to keep their businesses open, while staff are “barely coping” with pressures, a survey conducted by Community Pharmacy England (CPE) has revealed.
Results of CPE’s ‘Pharmacy pressures survey 2025‘, published on 12 November 2025, revealed that more than 64% of pharmacies were currently experiencing staff shortages, while 21% reported that they had to close temporarily during the past year owing to staff shortages.
In its report, which highlights the views of over 4,300 pharmacy owners and 1,600 pharmacy team members, the negotiating body called for increased funding to support recruitment and retention of pharmacy staff.
It also recommended that NHS England should allow pharmacies to close their doors while staff undertake training, which would enable protected learning time in community pharmacy.
Just over four in ten (42%) of pharmacy owner respondents said that staff shortages were caused by challenges in recruiting permanent staff, while 32% attributed the shortages to staff sickness — often linked to stress and other pressures of working in pharmacy.
The vast majority of respondents (95%) reported that, alongside temporary closures, staff shortages were associated with increased pressure on remaining team members.
Anil Sharma, a pharmacy owner respondent to the survey, said: “My day usually begins around 4.00am. I spend the first couple of hours catching up on emails and messages from colleagues before waking my daughters for school.
“After helping them get ready, I turn to urgent staffing issues — including repeated visa applications for a pharmacy manager, which often go unanswered despite daily attempts. By 8.30am, I’m in the pharmacy, where I typically work until late evening, often without a proper break.”
Another pharmacy owner quoted anonymously in the report said: “I usually get just three hours of sleep before starting another 15-hour shift. It’s only because myself and my family members, who also run the pharmacy with me, work these extreme hours that our pharmacy is still open.
“We know colleagues who have suffered strokes and heart attacks from this workload. How long can this go on?”
The survey also found that staff shortages resulted in increased waiting times for patients, according to 81% of respondents.
Over half (57%) of respondents said that staff shortages meant a reduction in the ability to offer services and advice to patients, while 33% reported that they had stopped providing non-essential services owing to staff shortages.
In addition, nearly three-quarters (70%) of pharmacy staff respondents said their work negatively impacts their mental health and wellbeing, with one-quarter (25%) of pharmacy staff respondents stating that they were “barely coping” or “not coping at all”.
Janet Morrison, chief executive of CPE, said: “This report highlights the human cost behind the data, especially the dedication of professionals keeping services running under immense strain. Their commitment to patients is unwavering, but it cannot be taken for granted.
“The experiences of pharmacy owners and their staff who have shared their stories with us show the extraordinary personal sacrifices pharmacy professionals are making just to keep their doors open.”
Commenting on the survey results, Amandeep Doll, director for England at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS), said the CPE survey echoed the findings of the RPS’s ‘Workforce wellbeing survey 2024‘, published in February 2025.
“Our survey found 87% of pharmacists are at high risk of burnout, with more than half saying that medicines shortages are affecting mental health and almost half reporting verbal abuse from patients as they struggle to provide the care people need. Inadequate staffing, unsustainable workloads and rising costs are also taking a serious toll on the wellbeing of the workforce,” she said.
“These findings underline the urgent need for the government, employers and the NHS to work together to tackle staffing shortages, strengthen medicines supply chains and prioritise the wellbeing of pharmacy teams, so that safe patient care can be maintained.”
Leyla Hannbeck, chief executive of the Independent Pharmacies Association, said: “It is wholly unacceptable that the hardworking staff and owners of community pharmacies are paying such a heavy price for the unsustainability of pharmacy funding.
“Sadly, unless the forthcoming funding settlement delivers a step-change we can only expect to see these pressures get worse.”
The CPE survey results were published on the same day as the NHS Providers’ 2025 ‘State of the provider sector‘ report, which suggests pressures are widespread across the system.
The majority (96%) of hospital trust leaders said they were either ‘extremely’ or ‘moderately’ concerned about the impact of seasonal pressures over winter on their trust and local area, commonly citing financial constraints and staffing provisions, the report found.
However, according to the report, concern about the level of burnout and morale in NHS trusts seems to have eased compared with the previous year.
In 2025, 78% of trust leaders were ‘extremely’ (28%) or ‘moderately’ (43%) concerned about morale in their workforce — down from 83% (40% ‘extremely concerned’ and 43% ‘moderately concerned’) in 2024, it revealed.
The Pharmaceutical Journal‘s 2025 salary and job satisfaction survey, published in October 2025, found that nearly half (48%) of pharmacists were not accessing any form of career support or training.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said: “Community pharmacists have a crucial role to play as we move more care out of hospital and into the community.
“That’s why we’ve increased funding by 19% to almost £3.1bn compared to 2023–2024 — the biggest uplift for any part of the NHS.
“Through our upcoming workforce plan, we will make sure the NHS has the right people in the right places, with the right skills to care for patients.”
