Pharmacists attending the British Pharmaceutical Conference had many opportunities presented to them, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society's President (Mrs Christine Glover) said in her address to the Conference banquet on September 14. These opportunities offered ways to address the challenges facing pharmacy.
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President: Conference offers networking opportunities |
The Conference was all about communication. Getting the right message across was a key part of the President's job, Mrs Glover said, just as it was part of every pharmacist's job. One way of judging the health of the profession was by looking at the number of young pharmacists who were attending the Conference to present papers. Mrs Glover said it gave her great pleasure to meet them.
Looking ahead, the President said that pharmacy faced many challenges. One approaching challenge was for the profession to pull together and show both politicians and the public that it could be relied upon to maintain pharmacy services to the public across the extended millennium holiday period at the end of the year.
"I hope that you will all show that this can happen," the President said.
Ms Jane Hutt (Health and Social Services Secretary, National Assembly for Wales) said that the Conference was a traditional forum for the presentation of new works of practice and science within the profession.
"Equally impressive is the profession's desire to move forward. We see your work in clinical governance areas as an exemplar to other professions," she said.
Ms Hutt highlighted the long wait endured by the Society's Welsh Executive for devolution and a permanent home in the principality. The executive had been established in 1976 when Welsh devolution was first proposed, something she had campaigned for at the time. Now it had opened an office in Cardiff close to the site of the National Assembly. She looked forward to visiting the office.
"I do not think you will regret the long wait, as we see an enhanced role for pharmacy in the future," Ms Hutt said.
Professor Ray Rowe (Conference Science Chairman) noted that the theme of the Conference was "New technology: a catalyst for change", but he said that change could only occur when there was human intervention to put technology to use.
"We tend to look at technology only in ‘hardware' terms, that is as objects. We often forget the ‘software', the human impact and influence."
He illustrated this point with a story about an old and humble technology, the condom: Missionaries who had introduced the condom to a remote village had been distressed to find that it had not reduced the rate of pregnancies. Returning to the village they found the men wearing condoms on their fingers and over the end of poles, which was, after all, how the missionaries had demonstrated the use of the condoms.
"We as pharmacists are at the interface between the public and a high technology industry working at the forefront of science, but in order for this technology to produce any change we must educate the public to use it properly," he said.