We concentrate today on asserting our human rights, and often conveniently overlook our human responsibilities, which may prove difficult to define and lead us into ethical dilemmas. The acceptance of responsibility involves ensuring our competence in any given situation.
If we claim to be professional in our approach to our occupation we must shoulder the necessity not only of establishing our competence in the first place, usually by way of examinations, but also of maintaining it through continuing education and training. The updating of special knowledge and skills has in the past been left largely just to chance and inclination, but there is no sound reason why those people who rely on experts for advice and assistance should not lay claim to ensuring that expertise is constantly updated.
Recent revelations about widespread medical incompetence and arrogance, and the apparent inability of a professional disciplinary organisation based on the sacred principle of self-regulation within the closed profession to ensure uniformly high standards of knowledge and conduct, have shattered many people's faith in a learned profession as a safe recourse in time of need. Politicians and lawyers, who also claim adequate self-regulatory powers, and offer expert services to a public which cannot be expected to undertake close criticism, have also come under grave suspicion. The alarming BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) scandal has thrown doubt on civil service competence and that of consulting bodies, and demonstrates the necessity for a transparency and openness which will overcome the peril of infiltration by vested commercial or bureaucratic interests and protect those who depend on objective advice and balanced judgment. Bodies responsible for railway affairs have shown how easy it is to shelve simple ethical and practical considerations in the face of financial demands, and have shown themselves either incompetent or uncaring. The power of money and self-interest spreads remorselessly and edges out ethics.
Pharmacists are being told repeatedly that they must ensure by every possible means that their knowledge and techniques are kept fully up to date. They have also been warned that there may be threats to the present power of self-regulation of their profession. Perhaps they should reflect that, as happens in the civil service, the legislative services and in medicine, any profession which lays too much emphasis on the shibboleth of sole and undisputed right to manage the daily affairs of its members, without reference to anyone else, is in grave danger of unleashing a public scandal if anything goes awry, and of destroying public faith in their competence to practise.