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| Left to right: Philip Brown (chairman of the School of Pharmacy council), Fernand Sauer (executive director, European Medicines Evaluation Agency), Andrew McKeon and Professor A. T. Florence (dean of the School of Pharmacy |
The Department of Health intends to put the recently announced pharmacy plan
into effect, whether or not it has the profession’s support.
“We are going to put into effect what has been set out there,” said
Mr Andrew McKeon (head of medicines, pharmacy and industry division, Department
of Health), speaking at the School of Pharmacy’s charter dinner in London
on October 18. “We are going to give it a go. We hope very much that the
pharmacy profession and the pharmacy bodies will come along with us and help
us work out the detail.”
Two essential questions about pharmaceutical services had to be answered, Mr
McKeon said. Were patients getting the best possible service and was the most
being made of pharmacists’ skills? The first question had a number of elements.
One was the question of access. There were no real complaints there, but, as
a civil servant, Mr McKeon had frequently had to explain that there was not
a problem when the personal experience of Ministers and their advisers, including
those based in the Prime Minister’s office, was otherwise.
“In terms of access, the service is good, but it fails the absolute test
of what people actually want these days,” Mr McKeon said.
Turning to whether the right medicines were available, Mr McKeon concluded that
the answer was no. That was why the National Institute for Clinical Excellence
had been established. Did people get the right advice and did they use medicines
correctly? The common view was that they did not. Poor anticoagulation control
was behind many hospital admissions.
His conclusion was that the scorecard on services read: “Good, but not
good enough.”
Turning to the issue of whether the most was being made of pharmacists’
skills, Mr McKeon said that the answer was no. This had been talked about for
many years, but nobody had achieved better use of pharmacists’ skills.
The reasons for this lay in the way services were organised, how they were incentivised
and their culture. There was also the question of whether pharmacists actually
had the skills that were talked about ready and available for use in practice.
Mr McKeon also touched on the issue of professional self-regulation. New Labour
had asked whether training, education, workforce matters and regulation could
safely be left to the individual professions. It had concluded that the answer
was no. That was not to say that there was a threat to take over regulation
if the professions did not put their houses in order. But there was a desire
for more lay input and for greater involvement.
“We are happy to be led,” Mr McKeon said, “but we have to be
happy that it is going in the right direction.”