Community pharmacies frequently remain visible and accessible when other local health services contract, relocate, become harder to reach, or disappear. Their continuing presence can intensify neighbourhood expectations for advice, triage, medicines support, prevention, and informal substitution for services that were previously delivered elsewhere. Yet accessibility alone does not establish an unlimited professional obligation to absorb unmet demand. This article develops a normative Fair-Burden Framework for determining how community claims should be translated into pharmacy responsibilities when local health-service capacity is uneven. The analysis integrates evidence on pharmacy deserts, service closure, spatial inequity, extended pharmacy roles, working conditions, moral distress, resilience, and service implementation with distributive-justice reasoning. The framework separates five questions that are often collapsed: how strong the community claim is; whether the requested response fits pharmacy competence and authority; whether usable organizational and workforce capacity exists; whether the additional burden is proportionate to the benefit and risk avoided; and which responsibilities remain with organizations, commissioners, and public systems even when pharmacies provide temporary assistance. Workforce protection is treated as a justice constraint because staff safety, time, moral agency, and capacity affect the legitimacy of further burden assignment. The framework therefore permits increased pharmacy responsibility where unmet need is serious, alternatives are weak, the response is role-compatible, and adequate resources are supplied, while requiring redistribution when local accessibility is being used to compensate for avoidable system withdrawal. A fair neighbourhood obligation is consequently conditional: community pharmacy should provide proportionate, competent and feasible assistance, but responsibility for maintaining access cannot be transferred automatically to the provider that happens to remain most visible.
