Pharmacy in 2030?

So where do I think pharmacy in 2030 will be?

The year is 2030, the streets are busy, and one thing missing from every street is a pharmacy. Where have they gone you might ask? It all happened around 2009. Pharmacists were made to become Responsible with the option of not being present at the pharmacy. This led to a major change in the upcoming years. Pharmacists decided to use the loophole not to be present at the shop, with this evolving to them never being present. This caused a massive mistrust in the profession and a massive slip in patient care, and most importantly to the companies, profits. Pharmacists were starting to be forced to go to work but they decided they still didn’t want to deal with the stress of travelling to work, dealing with customers face to face and not getting their lunch breaks. They were enjoying the quiet life.
So how is the profession still around? Well a computer company and a pharmacist came together to decide how to get around all this. In 2012 there was the development of a Pharmacy dispensing machine or a PDM (a fancy cash machine pretty much). This resulted in most pharmacists converting their premises into health stores without any prescription medicines or pharmacy only medicines- they may as well still make money from the front of their shop. With the dispensing robots now common place, all you had to do was insert your prescription into the machine along with your id, and a camera would give a live feed to a pharmacist in a control room (usually in their house or at a head office facility) and would check the script clinically and legally, and then the robot would do the rest. The PDM had an interactive menu which meant the customer could ask advice on the medication, these were all stored on the computer, but if the computer wasn’t giving the patient what they wanted they could ask the pharmacist some questions via the live feed, but this would require a credit card to be entered into the PDM first for a counselling fee-why would we give up our free time for free?
With this effectively killing off the independents, the multiples took over all the shops. Converted them into their own type of health store and inserted the PDM’s at the back of the store. So what happened to pharmacists? Well most got a nice pay off from the multiples, and the rest joined up to be control room pharmacists. All they had to do was sit in a room and check prescriptions for possibly 20 stores. This cut down the amount of pharmacists needed and made the multiples a lot more money. It also meant that the two schools of pharmacy in northern Ireland were grinding to a stop, as over the years people realised with this new control room, only 1 pharmacist was needed for a range of stores rather than just one per store, this made jobs even more scarce than they already were and made the schools less appealing and students moved to other professions rather than the over saturated one of pharmacy.
What wasn’t realised was that the only keeping most of these pharmacists fit in the past was the fact they were on their feet for 9 hours a day without being allowed to sit down for lunch, and this new control room pharmacist began to become overweight and over the 20 years since it was introduced bred a new obese pharmacist. In the late 2020’s Alli signed a deal with all pharmacies to supply their tablet for free to control room pharmacists to help deal with the epidemic.
So where did the pharmacists who didn’t get the control room jobs go? A lot have moved into the museum business or moved into teaching the history of pharmacy at universities across the UK and Ireland. The museum business meant they kept their pharmacy intact and they would role-play with tourists how they used to act with customers. Some of these pharmacies still exist in rural locations as a tourist attraction. They are also good history trips for children at local schools as well, who have been raised on the PDM system of pharmacy. The rest either retired with their lump sums from multiples or joined the dole queue, hoping and dreaming of a job some day.
A possibility or just bad pharmacy fiction? Who knows?