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Diamond Jubilee Bank Holiday
The Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations are due to be held over the first weekend of June. As part of the celebrations, the government have changed some of the official bank holidays and created an additional one so there will be a four-day weekend.
The end of May bank holiday has been moved to Monday 4th June 2012 and the extra bank holiday will be on Tuesday 5th June 2012.
As is usual for bank holidays, the hours that a pharmacy normally would have been open on those days can be counted towards its core contractual hours for that week, but the pharmacy can be closed on those days.
Pharmacy contractors are encouraged to inform their PCT whether their premises will be open on bank holidays. This information is obviously of critical importance to PCTs in order that they are able to plan pharmacy provision during holiday periods. If PCTs are not able to determine the opening hours of pharmacies, with a high degree of certainty, their option may be to issue directions to one or more pharmacies, requiring them to open. This clearly is not in the best interests of pharmacies if there are other suitable pharmacies that would have been open – so PSNC recommends that all pharmacies notify their intentions – and then open as they have notified.
The following Microsoft Word e-forms can be used by pharmacy contractors to notify their intended Bank Holiday opening hours to the PCT. The forms can be filled out electronically using MS Word. Alternatively the form can be printed off from the PDF version and filled out by hand.
Form BH2012 (MS Word e-form)
Form BH2012 (PDF File)
For more information regarding pharmacy opening hours, please see the opening hours section of our website.
Posted 27 January 2012