"Rural patients denied pharmacy choice"

In rural areas patients GP practices often have a dispensary where they can collect their prescription drugs. Pharmacists have been expanding their businesses in to rural areas and threatening the viability of rural GP practices. Worse than this, the patients who happen to live within 1.6 kilometres of the pharmacy, without their involvement or agreement (no decision about me without me) are forced to stop using the GP dispensary. The madness of this scheme is that the GP practice still has the dispensary but we cannot use it! Not only this madness but the NHS pays a subsidy to the pharmacy while taking money away from the rural GP practice, threatening its very existence. We lose the local hospitals and our GP practice, but still have pharmacies we do not want!