A WREXHAM councillor has described daily queuing outside a pharmacy as "unacceptable".

Every day queuing outside Well Pharmacy on Market Street in Rhos is said to stretch up the street, with Cllr Paul Pemberton saying the issue appears worse there than any other area of Wrexham.

Well Pharmacy owns two chemists in Rhos, one of which is closed due to staffing shortages amid Covid-19 shielding, the company said.

Due to these shortages it decided to merge the work of the two pharmacies into one.

Acknowledging the issue of the queues, the company says to help alleviate the situation, it has been having two pharmacists working at many times to help the team deal with the "huge demand" for medication that it's experienced over these last few weeks.

However, Cllr Pemberton, who says while its staff are "doing a fantastic job under huge pressure", describes the queueing to get into the chemist as "tedious and frustrating".

He says he has been in contact with Well Pharmacy and it was hoped that with the help of volunteers waiting times will be reduced.

Volunteers are requested to take names of queueing customers, and to pass details of their prescription to pharmacists in the chemist to prepare them.

Well Pharmacy says it has PPE for anyone wishing to volunteer for this service.

The company says it "wants to get back to the situation where both pharmacies are open for the community again", but that it first needs to be "confident that sickness levels have fallen" and it can provide the "right service" from both locations.

In the meantime, it says it believes the best approach to continue with the system in place currently where it can focus "all resources from one location to help process patients’ medication as quickly as possible".

The company says having queues outside its pharmacy is "not something we like to see" and is "doing all we can to process patients’ prescriptions as quickly as possible".

It is urging people to make use of its text notifications service so that patients only need to come to the pharmacy when they know their medication has been made up and is ready to collect.

A Well Pharmacy spokesman said: "We've followed the Government advice to have ‘closure periods’ during the day that enabled the teams to focus solely on preparing patients’ prescriptions so that more were ready to collect quickly.

"We're pleased to say that we’ve been reducing these ‘catch up’ periods so from Monday, it will only be closed between 1 and 2pm.

"While we acknowledge that this is a difficult time for everyone, we do thank the local community for their understanding and patience – and indeed the help of volunteers - as our teams do everything they can to dispense their medication and still be there for the health and wellbeing advice that the community is used to from our teams."