The Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 264 No 7092 p587
April 15, 2000 The Society

"Scientist in the high street" campaign

A campaign to raise the public profile of pharmacy as the embodiment of science in the high street was launched by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society on April 5 with the publication of a leaflet called "Medicines don't just happen".
The leaflet identifies the major advances in the treatment of diseases over the past 100 years, showing how the pharmaceutical sciences have contributed to the health of mankind and drawing attention to the huge amount of scientific effort that goes into the production, development and dispensing of modern medicines.

Launching the leaflet at a reception attended by pharmaceutical scientists and representatives of Government agencies and departments, Professor Bill Dawson (chairman of the Society's Science Committee) said that gaining the public's trust and its understanding of the true benefits of science was a major challenge. Many problems with the public's perception of science could be overcome by promoting the work of scientists at a more everyday level. Those who used a pharmacy regularly understood that the pharmacist was the best first port of call for advice on medicines and the treatment of minor ailments. But how many knew that to provide that level of service all pharmacists had undergone an extensive period of scientific education and training? Their scientific knowledge about medicines was available to the public at any pharmacy, but it was underused and undervalued. A major challenge was to manage the public's future expectations of new medicines and what they would deliver. Every day the media bombarded the public with information about medicines, much of it of questionable origin and anecdotal in nature. The internet too had become a major source of information about medicines and here again the quality was extremely variable. Information needed to be available through authoritatively maintained sites. It was here that the "scientist in the high street" could play a key part in interpreting the information for the public.

Bill Dawson: problems with public perception of science

The Society's programme of public debates on "hot topics", which had started earlier in the year with a meeting on "Postcode rationing in the NHS", was one example of how the Society was communicating with the public to address health-related issues that were founded in the pharmaceutical sciences. As part of this ongoing education process the Society also ran a programme of consumer awareness campaigns to educate the public on the skills and services available from pharmacists. Because of its concern to ensure that all medicinal products used by the public were both safe and effective, the Society was seeking to introduce a level of regulation for herbal products that were not currently licensed. In consultation with the Medicines Control Agency, it was calling for a "third category" of herbal medicines that complied with standards for quality and safety and protected the public from hazardous products. It was also important to prepare for the "genomics revolution". With the completion of the human genome project in the next couple of years, it would be possible to determine the unique genetic make-up of individuals, to provide information about their disease susceptibility and their responsiveness to specific medicines. This approach would provide for a better targeting of medicines that met individual patient needs. Diagnostic testing and genetic typing of patients would become a routine procedure before medicines were prescribed. Pharmacists, with their scientific training and close contact with the public, were set to be increasingly important members of the primary health care team. However, this again came back to the important issue of how best to manage people's expectations and inform a public that was so easily swayed by conflicting media reports on this and so many other scientific topics. The Society was committed to a long-term programme that would help to develop the pharmacy profession so as to make the best use of its scientific background. The launch of the leaflet was just the first step. The Society was already developing a series of fact sheets covering a range of topics, including herbal medicines, genetically modified foods and homoeopathic care - all topics that had a high profile and for which pharmacists, through science, could help educate and inform public opinion.

The "medicines don't just happen" leaflet

Earlier, welcoming guests to the reception, the Society's President (Mrs Christine Glover) said that the public might see no obvious link between pharmacy and science, but it was the Society's belief that a wider understanding that medicines were the products of science would support more responsible and effective use. Pharmacists were scientists who were experts in medicines, and their expertise would be increasingly valued by government for the future of health care delivery.
The Society's chief scientist (Professor Tony Moffat) represented the Society on the patients and public task force health care panel of the Foresight initiative established by the Office of Science and Technology to identify future health issues. Several of the initiatives that had come out of Foresight programme were closely linked to the questions facing pharmacists and pharmaceutical scientists, such as how best to deliver local health care to an ageing population, how to develop health care systems care to meet the public's rising expectations and to encourage patients to be more involved with their own health, and how best to support those in the community with mental health problems.
Lord Newton of Braintree (the Society's Parliamentary adviser and a former Secretary of State for Health) told the reception that the campaign represented an important shift within the Society. Science had transformed health care, but when the public thought about aspects of health technology such as transplants, they tended not to appreciate that such developments all rested on the application of science.
Lord Newton was speaking in place of Lord Sainsbury (Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Trade and Industry), who had agreed to address the reception but had had to withdraw at a few hour's notice because of the death of his father. No other Government spokesperson had been available at such short notice.