A clear indication of the investment that community pharmacists have in the National Health Service was given by the President of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (Mrs Christine Glover) to guests at a Council dinner on February 2.
Mrs Glover said that within an average primary care group there might be about 40 community pharmacies. This private investment was worth about £100m. Those pharmacies served around 150,000 people with over-the-counter medicines and about a million prescriptions a year at an average cost of about £10.
Good pharmaceutical advice would be essential in managing such an enormous drug budget, Mrs Glover added.
Turning to the subject of drug abuse, Mrs Glover said that virtually all of the members of the Society's working party on the subject were present that evening. Why had the Society reported on drug abuse? The reason was that community pharmacists were currently dispensing a million methadone prescriptions in a totally outdated framework of regulations. If that framework was not changed into a more user friendly form, the service would crack under the strain.
Urging development of a prescribing role for pharmacists, Mrs Glover said that patients with a clear diagnosis, say, of high blood pressure, could be monitored by a community pharmacist and prescriptions adjusted by the pharmacist within agreed protocols. Cardiovascular illness was one of the Government's major targets, she noted.
Speaking on behalf of the guests, Professor Sir Charles George (chairman of the joint formulary committee, which oversees the British National Formulary) said that he had been enormously impressed by the standards that the Society achieved and maintained in its publications. As well as carrying out the editorial work on the BNF, the Society also published Martindale, which was a "wonderful" book. The work done in the publications area was phenomenal, Professor George said. He had been associated with the BNF since edition 12 [published in 1986] and it had been a great privilege to work with the Society on it