From Mr A. Nathan, MRPharmS
SIR,—Six months ago you published my letter expressing my deep disquiet over the conduct of the Society's Council (PJ, June 26, p918). I said that if I felt that matters continued to deteriorate I would give the membership details of exactly what was going on. I would now like to bring members up to date with the Council's progress over the past six months, and I am pleased that I have a more positive report to present than when I last wrote.
In spite of the secrecy with which much of the Council's business was conducted, by last summer many of the Society's members seemed aware that problems and unrest had been developing within the Council for some time. Letters were published criticising the manner of Christine Glover's accession to the presidency, and the sham of the "unanimous" public election process for the President was exposed. Further disquiet within the Council followed the allocation of members to committees and the appointment of committee chairmen by the Officers (the "inner cabinet" made up of the President, Vice-President, Immediate Past President and Treasurer).
As a result, at the August meeting of the Council, three motions were put and carried which were intended to improve governance of the Council and the transparency of its proceedings and of Officers' meetings. Also during the August Council meetings the President took the initiative to convene a special "no holds barred" meeting to allow Council members to speak their minds frankly and get out into the open the issues that were the cause of resentment. This meeting, though not entirely successful, I felt was the start of a recovery process. And I personally was impressed at the way the President listened to and accepted criticism, and later came forward with positive initiatives by way of response.
The main outcome of that meeting was the establishment of working groups to address a number of issues of governance. These included:
All these groups have now brought forward their proposals, which have been accepted almost in their entirety and are now being implemented. Details of these were published in the reports of the Council's December and February meetings. The main result will be that the activities and conduct of the Council will be opened up to the scrutiny of the membership, and that the procedure for the election of the President and other Council Offcers will be more structured and fully transparent.
Another positive initiative of the President, in my view, has been the provision of a training course for Council members and senior staff in corporate governance and strategic thinking. This has been beneficial from several points of view. First, it is making Council members aware of their responsibilities to the organisation and to the members they represent. It is helping Council members and staff to get to grips with the revolution in the corporate culture, organisation and management that has resulted from adopting new ways of working at headquarters as part of the Pharmacy in a New Age initiative. It is preparing Council members for the more strategic role that they are now expected to play. And not least it has had the effect of beginning to rebuild a "team spirit" within the Council, something that I felt had waned considerably in recent years.
So, I believe that the state of affairs within the Council is beginning to improve, although it is still some way from being out of the woods. In the first place, the corporate ethic does not appear to have been fully espoused by some Council members, who still seem unable to put the interests of the profession before their personal or very narrow sectional or commercial interests. This is not to say that Council members should not forcefully represent the views of the community, hospital or industrial or any other sector, which is entirely legitimate and what they were elected to do. But some waste the Council's time and delay it from getting to grips with the real issues by using debates to make personal statements or pursue their own agendas. This is, however, nothing new and has gone on ever since I have been on the Council. What is new and disturbing is the level of absenteeism at Council meetings: in past years there was almost full attendance at all meetings; it is now not uncommon to see up to six unoccupied seats.
The test of the recently agreed measures to improve the way in which the Council conducts its business and makes its workings more visible to the Society's members, will be in whether in future more time is spent in Council meetings actually dealing with the issues confronting the profession rather than just trying to get to them, as has too often been the case in the recent past. I intend to maintain a watching brief on the Council's performance from the inside to see if it achieves this, to report candidly on what I see, and to expose conduct that I believe does not best serve members' interests.
In case anyone should think that this letter is merely a piece of pre-Council election propaganda, I should point out that I was re-elected last year and my current term of office extends to 2002.
Alan Nathan
London N21