Pharmacy as a profession needs to remain inherently optimistic. If it does not do so, the recent passage of events could make it sink into despair. Let us look at some of those events, or rather non-events. The long promised pharmacy strategy has been put off so often that there must now be serious doubt as to whether it will ever appear (see p599). The Health Minister Lord Hunt ducked the opportunity of announcing financial support for the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee's medicines management initiative when he spoke at the PSNC's annual dinner recently (PJ, March 25, p480), even though the PSNC's chairman had used his speech at the dinner to put a powerful case for such professional intervention. The profession was overlooked when the membership was announced of six action teams that are to help the Government draw up plans to modernise the NHS (PJ, April 8, p531), despite the profession's long-standing commitment to the service. Underlying all this, the chief pharmacist post at the Department of Health has remained unfilled for a year, again suggesting an inadequate level of support for the profession.
Meanwhile, the Health Secretary has been wooing the nurses with plans for extending their prescribing into hospitals and to give them budgets to make ward improvements (Daily Telegraph, April 6). And the pharmaceutical industry is to have a joint task-force to help strengthen its competitiveness (see p598). We are pleased for the nurses and the industry, but their good fortune only serves to highlight the lack of anything for pharmacists to cheer about.
Perhaps pharmacy should stop behaving like Dr Pangloss, for whom all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire's fictional character could see good in the most adverse of events. He would have found something positive about pharmacists being left on the sidelines in government paper after government paper. At least they would not have had to clean their boots (or even buy any), he would have observed.
In that vein, pharmacy seems to have got into the habit of thanking the Government or its agents for crumbs of comfort, when the diet being served up is generally unpalatable. Some plain speaking is, in our view, called for. At least it should be tried. Pharmacy wants to get its boots dirty.