The Society

From the branches

“Editor should appoint PJ board”

The editorial advisory board that is to be set up to guide and assist the editor of The Pharmaceutical Journal should be appointed by the editor and not by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s Council, according to The Journal’s former editor, Mr Douglas Simpson.

In a talk to the Society’s North Hampshire branch on January 8, Mr Simpson said that to have a board appointed by the Council would lead to questions over who was running The Journal. It should be quite clear that the editor was in charge.

Mr Simpson noted that the proposal to have an advisory board had resulted from a “brainstorming” meeting of people with a knowledge of journal editing and of pharmacy (PJ, October 14, 2000, p549). But, when accepting recommendations arising from the meeting, the Council had made no decision on who should appoint the board. When the time came, the editor should issue the invitations. He or she would know the kind of support needed and should be allowed to choose.

Mr Simpson noted that the report of the brainstorming meeting had said that the letters published in The Journal should be those that were “informed and were not personal or offensive”. Fortunately, the report had made no recommendation on this point and the Council had had the good sense to steer clear of something that would be a severe restraint on freedom of expression. Readers should be free to express their views within the normal restraints of the libel laws and general good taste. In any case, who was to judge what was personal or offensive?

Freedom of speech was an important part of the democratic process. Council decisions could have had a profound effect on pharmacists’ working lives. It was essential that the Society’s members should have their say. The Society was a forum for professional debate - and the more vigorous the better.

Mr Simpson went on to say that The Journal should continue to be editorially led. It should be run as a professional publication to the highest standards of biomedical journals generally, in terms of the integrity of its contents. It should also seek to generate as large a surplus as possible within that constraint. A proportion of that surplus should be used to finance its own development.

Mr Simpson pointed out that the position of The Journal had been pivotal, not peripheral, throughout the Society’s history. It had been established by Jacob Bell, the founder of the Society. It had been recognised as one of the great means of building up the Society from its earliest foundations. Furthermore, Martindale’s Extra Pharmacopoeia had been planned in the editorial offices of The Journal and a former editor of The Journal, W. K. Fitch, had been instrumental in the purchase of its copyright in the 1930s. As well as being the finest reference source on medicines in the world, Martindale was an important source of revenue and helped to finance the Society’s activities. Among other major publications that had begun life in The Journal was Ivan Stockley’s important book on drug interactions, which had started as a PJ series in May, 1971.

On the future of pharmacy, Mr Simpson said that the Government’s decision to take forward the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee’s proposals for medicines management pilot trials was the best news he had heard in his professional career. It was a sign that the Government was prepared to pay for a type of practice in which the pharmacist had a formal role in ensuring that medicines were used to best effect. He was expecting a high level announcement on the subject soon and hoped that the trials would be a success. He would track their progress in his new role as editorial director for Pharmalife’s pharmaceutical care/medicines management resource centre, which was in the process of being launched. The centre’s objective would be to provide a first port of call for pharmacists who wanted to find out about pharmaceutical care/medicines management and to promote the development of this practice-based model.

Medicines management, as described in the PSNC’s proposals, shared key characteristics with pharmaceutical care, in that both required an assessment of the patient’s drug therapy, the development of a care plan for that therapy and follow-up evaluation of the effect of that therapy.

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