Community pharmacies today look quite different from those of a decade ago. Moving well beyond filling scripts and selling OTC remedies, many now offer screenings and chronic disease management services once reserved for clinics.
Community pharmacies routinely stock flu, Covid, travel, and other preventive vaccines for adults and families, alongside routine immunisations. Some also handle biologics and other temperature-sensitive medicines for the management of chronic conditions.
This change has improved access to care across Australia, particularly in regional areas. In 2023, community pharmacies administered more than 2.2 million flu vaccinations by October, accounting for around 24 per cent of flu vaccinations administered at that point.1
But with expansion comes new pressure, and much of it has landed on pharmacy infrastructure that few business plans originally anticipated.
When it comes to storage requirements in community pharmacies, significant changes have occurred over time, and vaccination programs alone have grown considerably in recent years.
As such service offerings expand, so do the volume and variety of cold chain stock moving through the pharmacy. This can result in a quiet mismatch between what the business offers and what its equipment can reliably support.
This is reflected in supply chain resilience literature, which illustrates how pressure across distribution and storage systems can extend to pharmacy-level cold-chain capacity and monitoring.
Research findings also indicate that pharmacists delivered more than 11.6 million Covid vaccinations by early 2024. This further reflects the scale of cold chain responsibility now sitting within community pharmacy.2
When storage cannot keep up with service development, certain risks can escalate quickly. For instance, temperature fluctuations can reduce vaccine effectiveness, often without any visible signs. The affected stock may then need to be discarded, resulting in direct financial losses at a time when margins are already under pressure.
Compliance exposure follows closely behind, and pharmacy regulators expect documented, consistent temperature control for vaccines and other temperature-sensitive medicines. Temperature records may also need to be retained and made available if requested.
Therefore, pharmacies without adequate capacity and reliable monitoring may face compliance issues or service disruption if a cold-chain breach occurs. This is a significant setback for any facility that has invested time and resources in building those services.
When it comes to patient care, the impact is much harder to see, but it’s just as important. If compromised stock is not identified before use, vaccine potency may be affected, potentially requiring clinical review or repeat dosing advice.
With community pharmacies increasingly trusted as healthcare providers, it’s important that operational systems support the same standard of care patients expect.
Inadequate storage, left unaddressed, creates a gap between the care being promised and the care being delivered. That’s why treating storage as an afterthought becomes more difficult to justify as clinical services expand.
Today, the challenge isn’t simply maintaining compliance, but also ensuring infrastructure can support future service demands. Therefore, as pharmacies expand their healthcare offerings, it’s important to assess whether existing equipment can support a broader product range and increased stock volumes.
This means planning against future demand and choosing equipment designed for pharmaceutical use, with reliable temperature uniformity and continuous monitoring. It also means including storage upgrades in the business case for service expansion, rather than treating these as a cost to defer.
Reliable cold storage solutions also support multiple operational goals simultaneously. They protect product integrity and patient safety, and help meet the documentation requirements that regulators look for during audits.
In addition, they reduce stock wastage, which directly affects profitability as vaccination volumes grow. For a pharmacy investing in clinical services, the financial impact becomes more significant as service activity increases.
With community pharmacies firmly positioned as frontline healthcare settings, their scope of services is expected to keep growing. That’s why the pharmacies that plan for cold-storage capacity early will be best positioned to keep growing without compromising stock integrity or the care they provide.
By Nikolas Scott, Technical Sales Specialist, Life Sciences, Across International Australia, published in the August issue of Retail Pharmacy.Â
