A pharmacy has struggled to deliver essential services without Wi-Fi or phone signal after routine work to its Wi-fi network caused accidental damage.

Meadows Pharmacy in Liverpool was affected for five days, with the team noticing the problem last Thursday afternoon and the problem being resolved the following Monday morning.

Joy Sinnott, a trainee pharmacy technician, said work at the pharmacy “just came to a halt, quite literally everything just stood still”.

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“We just followed the protocol, we just worked well altogether as a team, just trying our best to help out - it was all hands on deck,” she added.

Important services were affected such as delivering medicines for nursing homes, urgent prescriptions, and providing medicines for children.

“Patients couldn't even get in touch with us at all if they needed to,” she said.

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Staff were forced to ring nursing homes and also tell customers looking for their medication to “try and source them at another pharmacy”, which meant that the pharmacy lost business.

In order to try and address the problem, the pharmacy purchased a dongle on Friday for one of the computers, but this still left the team without internet for seven of the other computers they work on day-to-day.

A mobile hotspot was also used for one of the other computers, but Sinnott described this as not “feasible for the long term” and because many locals resorted to using their mobile data, this also “slowed the service down a bit in the area”.

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The only way the pharmacy staff were able to contact customers was through word of mouth and their Facebook page.

Sinnott said “we were trying to ensure everyone was updated as much as possible through that, and when patients came into the shop we were making them aware of the situation”.

“We've got a really good team here, so we just took it in our stride,” she reflected. ”You don't expect something like this to happen, but you sort of get through it, you’ve just got to do the best that you can and work with it”.

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It comes after a Well Pharmacy in Monmouth was forced to operate out of a portacabin, after its premises were flooded during Storm Claudia in December.

All products in the pharmacy had to be destroyed due to contamination fears, which included “roughly 7,000” items.

It follows a Firstpoint Pharmacy in Bellshill suffering from a suspected arson attack in April.

Staff member Ting Tang told C+D that “no patients or staff were hurt” and the local police saying that the fire was “being treated as wilful”.