The Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s Council must urgently get to grips
with the task of examining the national plan for pharmacy and leading the profession
into the future, according to the author of an article in this week’s Journal
(see p615).
While the Council did discuss the plan at its last meeting (PJ, October 14,
p547), it spent
little time on any of its individual parts. Instead, it instructed the Society’s
Policy Support Unit to prepare a document for its December meeting, some three
months after the plan was first published.
We trust the Council appreciates the urgency of the matter. But, at the same
time, it must not forget its long-term strategic role — a role which the
recent reorganisation of its ways of working was designed to emphasise. As has
already been pointed out, many of the ideas outlined in the Council’s own
Pharmacy in a New Age process, which started five years ago, are included in
the implementation plan for the next five years. The Council must now start
thinking ahead to 2010 and beyond. By that time many of the futuristic parts
of the current pharmacy plan will have become commonplace parts of pharmacy
practice. Will dispensing, as we know it, still be part of most pharmacists’
day-to-day work? If not, what will they be doing, and where might they be based?
Trying to envisage the future while changing the present will be a hard task
for an already overstretched Council, but that, in part, is what its members
got themselves elected for.