At the age of 73, most people are taking it easy and enjoying their retirement, perhaps on a relaxing cruise or the golf course. Not Phil Hunt, the Bristol community pharmacist affectionately known to many as ‘Phil The Pill’.
Phil still works at the award-winning Stokes Croft Pharmacy most days and this week he marks 50 years since he qualified as a pharmacist. It’s also half a century since he bought his first shop in Clifton Village, which kickstarted a successful chain of pharmacies.
Business was going so well in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Phil even bought his own hot air balloon in the colours of his favourite football team, Aston Villa. Although it raised the profile of his business, he soon had to explain his ‘flash’ advertising method to the Pharmaceutical Society’s ethics committee.
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At one point, Phil’s ‘empire’ grew to eight pharmacist shops in the region, which he then sold in 1991 and retired early to South Africa, where he lived with his wife for 10 years. “It was more of an extended sabbatical,” says Phil, who returned to the UK 20 years ago, only to buy more local pharmacies including the one on Stokes Croft.
Although Phil concedes that it’s uncommon for pharmacists to still be working at the age of 73, he says he still enjoys the job. He also admits that he ‘retired’ too early when he sold his first business.
“Most pharmacists would have stopped long before 73 and they would be fed up with the idea of working whereas I still enjoy it. I did give up on the first business a bit young so I always knew I’d have to do something else - I couldn’t have stayed retired forever, I just needed something to do as it’s not in my nature to just lounge around the house.”
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Born in Solihull, near Birmingham, Phil trained to be a pharmacist in Bath and then did his work experience in Bristol. Within three months of qualifying, the shop in Victoria Square, Clifton, became available and he bought it.
“I did my post-grad training at the shop and I got back from a holiday to find my notification from the Pharmaceutical Society saying I had qualified. Then, on the Monday morning I was asked to report to the shop in Clifton because he’d sacked the manager while I was away and he wanted me to take over.
“About three weeks later he said he was thinking of selling it and asked if I wanted to buy it so I begged some money off my mother and got some good terms from the wholesalers and from the owner. Less than three months after qualifying I was the owner of a shop in Clifton at the age of 23.
“It was always my intention to run a business, rather than being an employee, because my mother’s side of the family were in business and my dad was a chartered accountant. I was always interested in the numbers and I always liked counting the cash and knowing it was mine!”
Phil is the first to admit that running the pharmacy on Stokes Croft isn’t easy. The area is well known for its rough sleepers and high number of drug users.
The pharmacy opens 365 days a year, mainly to dispense methadone to drug users. And yet despite its tricky location, Phil still enjoys the work.
“Stokes Croft is a challenging place but because of that it actually becomes more rewarding. We’re very much on the frontline and anybody can come into the shop, but we’d rather they were getting advice from us than on Google.”
Phil has a file on his computer called ‘there’s always a story’ and although it’s the title of his unwritten memoirs, it’s this mantra that he sticks to when dealing with challenging customers. He doesn’t judge people morally, and just wants to help them.
“You’ve got to see people as being in need. I just like people and I find them endlessly fascinating, even the difficult ones.
“When I was a kid at school, I did a Royal Lifesaving Society course and got a bronze medal for it. The motto sort of reads ‘if you see someone in need of help, see them as a friend’ and I’ve always gone along with that. If anybody needs help I will help them if I can.”
There are times when customers visit the shop under the influence of drugs or drink. They can become confrontational or difficult, but Phil and his staff deal with them in the same way.
“We have so many of these people coming in every day. I try my hardest to encourage the whole of my team, which has won Pharmacy Team of The Year, to be reasonable to people and they are more than reasonable to people who come in.
“My opinion has always been if you treat people nicely, they are much more likely to treat you well too. If you’re dismissive of them and say something like ‘oh, you’re only a junkie and I’ll get round to you in a minute’, they’ll start stealing stuff from you because they’re hanging around and then everyone gets upset and the whole thing goes belly up.
“Yes, sometimes it’s more difficult to do so, but I never judge people morally even if their problems are self-inflicted. One of the customers said to me the other day ‘nobody else has treated me as well as you do here’ - you can’t bottle the pleasure that gives me.”
And there are also occasions when difficult situations can often result in surprising outcomes. Phil is quick to give an example of an incident last week.
“One poor lad came in last week and he was in a bad way, he was having trouble drinking his methadone and then he sicked it up in a bowl. This went on for the best part of two hours getting him sorted but the day after he came in and said ‘I’m so sorry, I’ll try not to do that again’.
“You have to be fairly hardened to the fact that people are going to yell and scream and swear when things go well but they’re mostly swearing at each other or at the doctors and rarely directly at us. It’s water off a duck’s back and you can’t take it to heart or you’d get upset.”
Phil says that he has seen a huge rise in drug-related problems in Bristol over recent years. Not that addiction is anything new.
“It wasn’t as if addiction didn’t exist in the past but it’s nothing like the problem it has been over the past 10 or 15 years. Unfortunately, the drug Spice is still circulating in the area and people who come in under the influence of it are quite difficult as they’re really not in control of themselves - it’s nasty stuff.
“It’s also noticeable that there is now a downturn in life expectancy because people who are now between 30-50 are not leading anything like as healthy a life as we were 20 or 30 years ago. If one was to be critical, it’s that people have got lazy and they don’t even try to buy healthy food and prepare it, so many people eat microwave meals or takeaways.”
Over his 50 years as a pharmacist, Phil has also seen huge advances in medicine. There are also more conditions to treat, too.
“There are enormously more medicines and an awful lot more conditions that can be treated now that weren’t even recognised when I started. The treatment of cholesterol and heart disease, and the progress that has been made on cancer is dramatic.
“But some of it doesn’t tend to impact a great deal on community pharmacies like mine, they are more hospital-based. There’s also the recognition of the fact there’s a lot more diabetes around now than there ever used to be and the treatment for it is a lot cleverer and more effective.”
In recent years, the pharmacy has seen more people visiting for advice because they haven’t been able to get an appointment at their local doctors surgery. Although Phil and his team are happy to help, he does feel the profession is somewhat undervalued.
“I’ve always been willing to stop and talk to people but in recent times we’re being asked more often. The disappointment is that however much talk there is about how helpful your local pharmacist can be and advice to talk to them, the government hasn’t recognised this and rewarded pharmacy staff in the same way they do doctors and nurses.”
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