Mr Geraint Davies (the pharmacist Welsh Assembly member) was the guest of honour at the annual dinner of the Society's Welsh Executive in Cardiff on November 18. Welcoming him, Mr Colin Ranshaw (chairman of the executive) said that the executive was pleased that a pharmacist had been elected and he congratulated him on his success.
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Mr Ranshaw (left) with Mr Davies |
The forward programme of the assembly's Health and Social Services Committee included, among many other items, the development of strategies for primary care, health promotion, mental health, human resources, and substance abuse. A task and finish group was being set up on prescribing (see p845).
Pharmacists throughout Wales would be able to assist the assembly to realise the aims and objectives of those strategies. There were around 2,000 of them in Wales, working in the community, hospitals, industry, academia, general practitioners' surgeries, health authorities, local health groups and prisons.
The Health and Social Services Committee, in a debate on October 6 on the primary care strategy for Wales, had recognised that pharmacy was an under-utilised resource. The executive looked forward to working with the assembly to develop effective partnerships.
Pharmacists were the nation's guardians of medicines and drugs. When a patient visited a doctor they expected medical care. When a patient was on a hospital ward, they expected nursing care. Was it too much to ask that when a patient visited a pharmacy they should get pharmaceutical care and not just a packet of medicines handed over?
Mr Ranshaw suggested that the ideas for NHS Direct and NHS walk-in centres must have been spawned in community pharmacies. Pharmacy in Wales had its walk-in centres. Over 700 of them. They were effective, efficient, equitable, accessible, acceptable and appropriate.
Mr Davies said that it was an exciting time to be Welsh. Recent sporting events had raised the profile of the country and now it had its own assembly. He and Erica Barrie (the Society's secretary in Wales) got on well and he hoped that together they would be able to improve the place of pharmacy.
Mr Davies said that it was an honour and a privilege to be part of the assembly. He said that he had been disillusioned by politicians in the past. He hoped that in the future - though he could not promise anything - the Welsh Assembly would value pharmacists more than Westminster had done.
As an assembly member, he was concerned about the health divide between Wales and England. But as moves were being made to bring health expenditure in Wales closer to the English level, problems were being created for the health budget in Wales. Wales needed more money, not less. There was also a health divide between the Rhondda, where his constituency was, and the Vale of Glamorgan, and he wanted to see that reduced. The professions had to work together to achieve that. They would have to be innovative. Perhaps doctors, nurses and community pharmacists could be employed directly by the health service in new ways.
Pharmacy was totally underused as a profession. It had a major role to play in developing health care in Wales. He hoped that when there were improved health services in Wales and the people of the Rhondda were as healthy as the people in the Vale of Glamorgan, pharmacy would have played a major part in achieving those aims.