Anyone know anything about how Tesco Pharmacy are working at the moment?

[Michelleoftheresistance]

Two vulnerable people in the household, needing monthly prescriptions, which we usually pick up from the in supermarket pharmacy.

Our local Tescos pharmacy has been badly oversubscribed and understaffed for months, and usual procedure is that a queue of mostly elderly people stand for about 25 minutes in the middle of the busy store, waiting to get to the desk to ask for their prescription. They're asked to go and shop for half an hour while their prescription is made up. They then have to queue again for another 25 minutes to get to the front of the queue and collect said prescription.

I've repeatedly rang but not been able to get through to the pharmacy this morning, and when I rang Tescos central number all they could say was that as far as they knew nothing had been put in place for any of their stores and whichever of the two vulnerable adults has to go get the prescription should just social distance while doing this hovering about for an hour, in a superstore.

Please does anyone know anything about what else might be possible to do here?

Who is doing the food shopping for these vulnerable people? Can you not ask them or a neighbour to collect the prescriptions?
Unfortunately most pharmacies are understaffed at the best of times due to the poor government funding so obviously they will be worse during a pandemic.

I have recently signed up to Well. It's an app where you can order prescriptions - they contact your GP and make up the prescription and post it to you for free. Have used them 3 times now and they have been great, and really useful now I'm self isolating.

Thank you, both really useful posts.

We're doing the shopping - we're lucky enough to have a small local farm shop and aiming to go as rarely as possible, since there's no delivery slots anywhere. We have lovely neighbours but as it's usually an hour plus of faffing it isn't reasonable to ask them. I think the solution is to move to posted prescriptions, thank you for the recommendation. One of us will have to go down and do the queue performance tomorrow as our GP has already sent it there to be made up as usual. Grim when the most risk either of us will have taken in several weeks is going to get essential medication.