He’s the face of the NHS as it battles to fend off a winter crisis. Smiling reassuringly out of a poster at a bus stop near you, Roger Humbles is urging us to make sure we get our prescriptions filled in good time for the Christmas holidays and consult a pharmacist if we feel peaky.
Crisp white coat, NHS badge, stripey shirt and spotty tie – Humbles looks like a pharmacist from central casting. But he’s the real deal: a lifelong professional who has run his own high-street pharmacy in Herne Hill, south London, since 1999.
He’s also an accomplished jazz saxophonist, having played at Ronnie Scott’s and the Royal Festival Hall and toured in the UK and abroad with his own quartet as well as many top bands. The pharmacy, he jokes, is just his hobby.
So how did Humbles, a 58-year-old father of three, end up as an NHS poster boy? He’s not too sure.
“I’m not seeking to promote myself and although I am a semi-professional musician, I’m not comfortable standing up in front of an audience and putting myself in the limelight,” he says. “The general consensus is amusement all round that I’m actually doing this.”
He may be protesting too much. Last year, he agreed to audition and was chosen to play himself in a TV advertisement for a brand of allergy nasal spray (he wasn’t paid as that would have been against professional rules).
That performance, which included talking to camera and a very convincing sneeze, led to him being used by NHS England as one of four healthcare professionals in a Stay Well This Winter poster campaign a year ago, which was aimed specifically at older people and others with long-term health conditions.
This winter, he is the sole face of the campaign, now broadened to the public as a whole. The clear subtext is to try to ease pressure on hospitals and GPs by urging people to ensure they have sufficient supplies of regular medication and to go to their local pharmacist for health advice in the first instance.
Humbles thinks more of us are heeding the message about making the pharmacist our first port of call and are becoming more aware of the full range of services on offer, including – through local agreements in many areas – a growing range of medicines that were previously prescription-only.
But he admits that people still have a strong instinct to go straight to their GP when they feel ill, even if there is little to be done. “Lots of patients will go to the GP if they have a cold, but the GP can’t do anything that we can’t do.”
One thing casting a cloud over Humbles’s burgeoning promotional career is the threat to the future of high-street pharmacies posed by a 12% cut in their overall funding, which started to take effect this month.
Humbles has calculated that his own business will see an immediate 25% drop in dispensing fees, rising to 40% by the end of the decade, though this will be partially offset by other factors. He will survive, he hopes, but he fears for other pharmacies in low-income neighbourhoods that will be unable to cushion the blow with revenue from counter sales.
“If it was really a good idea to have a pharmacy cull, the way to do it would be to do a needs assessment of each area,” he says. “This will just hit those local pharmacies in less affluent areas and drive people to travel to use the big chains.”
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