Pharmacy late-night opening hours analysis featured in the Financial Times
Some data analysis I’ve done has been featured in the Financial Times today – see this article (the link may not work any more unless you have a FT subscription – sorry).
The brief story is that I had terrible back pain over Christmas, and spoke to an out-of-hours GP on the phone who prescribed me some muscle relaxant and some strong painkillers. This was at 9pm on a Sunday, so I asked her where my wife could go to pick up the prescription and was told that the closest pharmacy that was open was about 45-60mins drive away.
I’ve lived in Southampton for 18 years now, and years ago I knew there were multiple pharmacies in Southampton that were open until late at night – and one that I think was open 24 hours a day. I was intrigued to see how much this had changed, and managed to find a NHS dataset giving opening hours for all NHS community pharmacies. These data are available back to 2022 – so only ~3 years ago – but I thought I’d have a look.
The results shocked me: between 2022 and 2025, the number of pharmacies open past 9pm on a week day has decreased by approximately 95%! And there are now large areas of the country where there are no pharmacies open past 9pm on any week day.
I mentioned this to some friends, one of them put me in touch with a journalist, I sent them the data and was interviewed by them and the result is this article. In case you can’t access it, I’ll quote a couple of the key paragraphs here:
The number of late-night pharmacies in England has fallen more than 90 per cent in three years, according to an analysis of NHS data, raising fresh concerns about patient access to out-of-hours care.
…
The analysis of official NHS records was carried out by geospatial software engineer Robin Wilson and verified by the FT. Wilson, from Southampton, crunched the numbers after his wife had to make a two-hour round trip to collect his prescription for back pain that left him “immobilised”.
I’ll aim to write another post about how I did the analysis sometime, but it was mosly carried out using Python and pandas, along with some maps via GeoPandas and Folium. The charts and maps in the article were produced by the FT in their house style.
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This post originally appeared on Robin's Blog.
Categorised as: Academic, GIS, Python
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