From Mr D. R. Kent, MRPharmS
SIR,—It is not often that community pharmacy agrees wholeheartedly and, in this case, almost unanimously with the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee. The issue leading to this consensus is the proposal by the Practice Committee of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society that algorithms for counter prescribing protocols be put in place. The PSNC is quite right in rejecting this ludicrous suggestion. For the Practice Committee to suggest that pharmacists working in the community should need a crutch on which to base decisions made with the advantage of experience is insulting. Counter prescribing is an arcane art necessitating knowledge of the patient, the presenting condition, and the armamentarium available to the pharmacist. No protocol can replace these.
If one were to accept the necessity of these protocols and then take them to the extreme, the counter prescribing role of pharmacists disappears. A reasonably intelligent 16-year-old school leaver with a checklist could replace us.
Once again, the Society, its Practice Committee and its Council have shown themselves to be far detached from the everyday realities of the working life of the pharmacists they purport to represent. Whether the Society wastes our money in further advancing this mad concept or not is in the hands of the Council. If it is crazy enough to do so and if in the fullness of time algorithms are foisted upon us, an unwilling electorate, then I am confident that they will largely be ignored.
It is a basic concept that unenforceable law is bad law. Similarly, unenforceable protocols are bad protocols and in this case totally unnecessary.
The letter from Hassan Argomandkhah (PJ, February 26, p329), a member of the Council, is typical of the present attitude of the Council. He states that the proposal is put forward for consultation yet berates those who criticise it. Is the Council's opinion of consultation that only those who agree with it are right?
When will something come out of 1 Lambeth High Street that we can wholly support? I have waited a long time. The Society and its Council seem intent on helping drive the final nails into the coffin of community pharmacy. To undermine the knowledge and expertise of community pharmacists by the suggestion that such protocols are necessary is insulting.
David Kent
London N21