The way that the health professions maintain standards and govern themselves has been given great attention in recent times because of Government attempts to improve quality in the health service in the wake of a number of medical catastrophes. The Government's determination to raise standards has been made clear in a series of White Papers, including "A first class service", published almost two years ago (PJ, July 11, 1998, p40). Those White Papers recognised that professional self-regulation had a part to play in helping the Government to realise its ambitions. And the message that the professions got was that they had better put their respective houses in order and tighten their standards or they might lose their roles in this field. The professions have been looking at their methods of governance ever since.
In the light of this, the Director General of Fair Trading (see p832) seems to be swimming against the tide - at least so far as pharmacy is concerned - in launching an investigation into professional standards apparently based on the premise that those standards might be too high and thus be anticompetitive.
On the one hand, we have an arm of government implying that no stone should be left unturned in the quest for higher health service standards and, on the other, an official agency cautioning that those standards should not be so high as to interfere unreasonably with business competition.
While the latter might seem reasonable so far as some professions are concerned it would not seem helpful for pharmacy. It is now generally recognised that the highly publicised cases of patients coming to harm as a result of medical error are but the tip of the iceberg (PJ, March 25, p456). Since the prescribing of medicines is a leading form of medical intervention, pharmacists have a clear role in reducing the high level of error.
Standards need to be raised in the interests of public health, not lowered in the interests of business competition. It would be a pity if pharmacy in its attempts to align the competence of practitioners to the tasks in hand - something that is to be developed further in the future - was forever looking over its shoulder for possible disapproval from the Office of Fair Trading, which, by definition, will be concentrating on business imperatives.
There is a growing recognition that the future of pharmacy lies in viewing medicines not as commodities but as complex technical entities that need to be deployed in a caring and intelligent environment. In this kind of environment, it will be pharmacists' cognitive skills rather than their business acumen that will be to the fore. We hope that the Director General of Fair Trading will fully take account of this. The simplest thing would be to treat pharmacy as he is treating other health professions and leave it out of this particular review.