Censure for Council over process used in appointing
Journal editor
The
June 3 special general meeting of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society has
censured the Council for the process used to appoint a new editor for
The Pharmaceutical Journal. The meeting rejected a motion expressing
a lack of confidence in the Council’s elected members for offering the
post to a non-pharmacist.
Fifty-six pharmacists, including a number of members
of Council and Society employees, registered their attendance at the meeting.
The meeting was chaired by the Society’s Vice-President, Marshall Davies,
because the President, Christine Glover, had been delayed by transport
problems.
Two meeting requests
Opening the proceedings, the VICE-PRESIDENT said
that the meeting had been requested by two separate groups of 30 or more
members. One request had been initiated by Ashwin Tanna and the other
by Philip Walton. The purpose of the meeting was “to consider whether
the appointment of a non-pharmacist as editor of The Pharmaceutical
Journal was in the best interest of members and whether the appointment
merits censure by the meeting of the Council or individual members or
has led to loss of confidence in the Council by members attending the
meeting.”
The Vice-President asked Mr Tanna and Mr Walton
to speak first to air the concerns that had led them to initiate their
requests for a meeting.
ASHWIN TANNA said that he would wait until he could
speak to his motion.
PHILIP WALTON said that he had visited 30-odd pharmacies
in Salford to canvass opinion on a motion of censure on those Council
members responsible for the decision to take on a non-pharmacist editor.
It had seemed to him then that a motion of no confidence was extreme.
However, he now thought that even a motion of censure was probably no
longer needed. He had been influenced by the list of people on the editorial
board and, having met the new editor, Olivia Timbs, he accepted that she
was maybe the best person for the job. The only reason he was present
was to offer a possible alternative to a motion of no confidence.
PETER HERMAN said that the Council should act in
the interests of the members. The appointment of a non-pharmacist as editor
was not in the members’ best interest, irrespective of the talents of
the individual. It was a matter of principle. The members were gradually
being excluded from the running of their own profession. There was an
important principle that pharmacists should run their own profession and
be seen to do so. For over 150 years, pharmacists had run their profession
and edited The Journal. They had done an excellent task. He was
confident that within the membership was the ability, the confidence and
the strength to run the Society and its prestigious Journal in
the best possible way.
The appointment of an editorial board was a weakness,
not a strength. An editor should be independent, conscientious and have
in mind the interests of the profession and experience of the profession.
A motion of censure should be passed, purely as a warning shot.
JONATHAN BUISSON, who identified himself as a member
of staff of The Journal, said that the issue was whether the Society
was run by and for its members or by and for the Council. He felt that
it was fundamentally wrong to appoint a non-pharmacist as editor. The
Society had itself agreed that, since the job description circulated to
candidates had said that the editor should be “a pharmacist of not less
than five years’ standing”. The decision had not been taken in the members’
interests because it had not been taken by the members. It had been taken
by and in the interests of the Council and a number of senior directors.
The appointment process was at best flawed.
He believed that individual members of the Council
and senior members of the Society’s staff should be censured for the process
that had been undertaken. The President should be censured for presiding
over the shambles which the proceedings had become. The Vice-President
should be censured. He had chaired a panel of inquiry into the running
of The Journal which had not considered offering the post to a
non-pharmacist. The decision to open it to non-pharmacists had been taken
separately and afterwards. The Secretary and Registrar had apparently
taken the decision to appoint a non-pharmacist conjointly with head-hunters
and without apparent Council ratification. She has also failed to carry
out the appointment procedure in line with the Society’s official guidelines.
Mr Buisson had no confidence in the Council as a
whole. Council members had either approved a decision that lacked the
membership’s support or had not been in a position to override that decision.
He believed that the meeting should take a vote of no confidence.
Trustees
PETER SCHOFIELD (Cambridge) said that what concerned
him was not the new editor or her merits but the manner and the process
of the appointment. The Society belonged to its members and so did its
Journal. Council members had to remember that they were acting
as trustees for the members — primus inter pares — and not in any
other position. Those involved must have realised that ending a tradition
of 160 years of pharmacist editorship would be controversial. It was not
a management decision alone.
The correct procedure would have been to have had
a full, open and rigorous Council debate last autumn, fully reported.
The membership would have been made aware of the process and of the possibility
of a non-pharmacist editor being appointed and would have had the opportunity
to call an SGM then. In that way, an appointment process could have been
arrived at by democratic and transparent means. Why that had not occurred
was a mystery. It was this process that had to be considered. There were
no acts of bad faith sufficient enough to make it a motion of no confidence
but there were grounds for censure.
The meeting should make it clear to the Council
that it had to act with more thought for the membership and their deeply
held views. He hoped that the meeting would bring about better democracy
and more openness and transparency.
MAURICE HICKEY said that he was one of two members
who had travelled all the way from the Society’s Moray and Banff branch.
That was a measure of how branch members felt. The appointment process
had been an absolute shambles. A motion of censure or, in his opinion,
of no confidence, should be on those who had actually appointed Miss Timbs
and appeared to have forced the rest of the Council into a position where
they had had to rubber stamp the appointment. As it had happened in secret,
no one knew. He had no grouse with Miss Timbs, but he found it hard to
believe that none of the in-house candidates was up to the job.
Mr Hickey added that the meeting was flawed in that
members should not be having a discussion and then wondering what the
motion was. They should have had the motions first and be talking to the
motions. That was how he had always thought meetings should be run.
Motion of no confidence
The VICE-PRESIDENT then called on Mr Tanna to formally
propose his motion.
ASHWIN TANNA moved that: “This meeting has no confidence
in the elected members of the Society’s Council for offering a non-pharmacist
the post of editor of The Pharmaceutical Journal.” He said that
the first time that the membership had known that non-pharmacists would
be considered for the post was when the advertisement in the October 21,
2000, issue of The Journal said that the successful candidate would
“ideally” be a pharmacist. That wording had been approved not by the Council
but by the Secretary and Registrar on the advice of the recruitment consultant.
The Secretary and Registrar had stated that the
editor’s post had been opened to non-pharmacists on the basis that the
final decision would be that of the Council, but the Council had never
been given a chance to consider such a decision. At their February meeting,
Council members had been told that compensation would have to be paid
to the chosen non-pharmacist candidate if the Council did not approve
the appointment. In the end, Council members had had no option but to
ratify the panel’s choice.
In the light of criticism voiced by members of the
Society, the conduct of the affair was breathtaking in its complacency
and its defiance of democratic principles. It was hard to comprehend that
a suitable pharmacist could not be found.
The Council’s prevarication in calling the meeting
was further reason to have no confidence in it. Their actions over the
SGM were a further example of a thoroughly undemocratic, authoritarian
and devious attitude: “Delay as long as possible and the consequences
will have evaporated.” Finally, the wording of the official notice was
conciliatory and clouded the true purpose of the request. The Council
should understand that it could not ignore the voices of the membership.
It should restart the process of selecting an editor.
ROBERT BLYTH (a former editor of The Journal),
seconding the motion, said that the collapse in confidence in the Council
dated back to the 1997 Banks report, which had resulted in bimonthly instead
of monthly meetings of Council and thereby the loss of control of the
Society’s affairs. The system had failed and should be abandoned.
The Banks report had contained an anti-pharmacist
germ: it had said that the Secretary and Registrar need not be a pharmacist.
The 1998 AGM had turned that down. But, undeterred, in 2000 the Council
had opened the post of editor of Martindale, the very personification
of pharmacy, to clinical pharmacologists, ignoring or ignorant of the
fact that not many years previously the clinical pharmacologists had challenged
the pharmacist’s position in disseminating information about new drugs.
In the event, a pharmacist had been appointed.
Astonishingly, later that year the advertisement
for the post of editor of the PJ had indicated that the successful
candidate would “ideally” be a pharmacist. Believe it or not, the Council
had not been consulted about the radical change of policy. In February,
Dr Gordon Appelbe had pointed out in Council that what had been a management
decision was also a political one. The Secretary and Registrar had retorted,
ignoring that cardinal observation, that the appointment had not been
dealt with any differently to similar appointments. He would have thought,
said Mr Blyth, that it was a unique appointment.
Mr Blyth doubted whether the recruitment agency
that had suggested the shocking change knew much about editing the PJ
or whether the selection panel knew much more. Was it a fashionable idea
that specialist journals should be edited not by specialists but by general
editors unversed in the specialty? It was crazy.
Concluding, Mr Blyth said that the President had
called The Journal a “parish magazine”. Some parish! Some magazine!
MICHAEL BURDEN (Leicester) said that he wished to
speak passionately against the motion. It was not a question of giving
up a birthright; it was a question of recognising that things changed.
The Society should ensure that it had the best team to deliver its objectives.
His presumption was that there had been a free competition and an excellent
candidate had been appointed who turned out not to be a pharmacist. That
was the right thing to do. His understanding was that the Council had
had an opportunity to endorse that decision and the appointment had been
made.
JONATHAN BUISSON said that, in the way it had handled
the entire process of seeking a successor to Douglas Simpson as editor,
the Council had fallen seriously below the standard that members should
expect from their governing body. The meeting should support the motion.
Confused
PETER HERMAN said that the debate had gone in an
unusual way. He was accustomed to a motion being put and then debated,
but it seemed that the meeting had debated something, put the motion and
then debated it again. That seemed strange but might be characteristic
of how the Society was being run — in a confused manner.
Mr Burden had eloquently made the point that things
changed. They did indeed change, and pharmacists had changed, since most
now were better educated, more well rounded and more aware than ever been
before. In a free competition, a pharmacist could and should have been
found to be an excellent editor of The Journal. There should be
change, but change within the context of the profession’s traditions and
principles and change within the context of safeguarding the interests
of the members. The members owned the Society, and it should be run and
administered for their benefit. In this context, the meeting could confidently
vote that it had no confidence in the Council.
JOHN PEATTIE agreed that there had been change.
There had been a change towards teamwork. People working in pharmacy did
not all have pharmaceutical qualifications to undertake their jobs. In
hospitals there were technicians checking dispensing and technicians managing
pharmacies. The meeting should not criticise the Council for appointing
a non-pharmacist without grounds for showing that that person was not
the best person for the job.
DAVID SHARPE (London) said that the Society’s current
director of professional standards, Sue Sharpe, was not a pharmacist but
she was in control of pharmacy’s professional standards and she had revolutionised
the inspectorate. The British Medical Association no longer had a doctor
as its chief executive. Reuters, one of the biggest journalistic houses
in the world, no longer had a journalist as its chief executive.
DAVID ALLEN (Treasurer of the Society) said that
the biggest challenge facing the Council and the members was to have top
management for the Society, and he did not “give a monkey’s cuss” whether
they were a pharmacists or non-pharmacists. The sooner the profession
stopped navel gazing, the better.
ANDREW BURR (Nuneaton) said that he was an elected
member of the Council but had not been at the meeting at which the appointment
decision had been ratified. However, he stood with the decision that was
taken because those who had taken that decision — even if the process
was wrong — had the best interests of the profession at heart. If the
motion was passed, he would have to take it as a lack of confidence in
his own ability. If members wanted to so something for the profession,
they should vote the motion down.
ASHWIN TANNA, summing up, suggested that the Council
wanted a weak editor — not weak in the personal sense but in the sense
of not being thoroughly familiar with the field and therefore not in a
position to stand her own ground. The Council also wanted an editor who
would not be as willing as the previous incumbent to publish members’
views. Indeed, there was already evidence that members’ views were being
suppressed.
A non-pharmacist editor having been appointed, a
senior assistant editor, a pharmacist, had been made deputy editor. One
could only assume that this was because the editor needed someone to guide
her in respect of matters concerning the profession and to boost the low
morale of the editorial staff.
The motion was then put to the meeting and was lost,
by 23 votes to 14.
Motion of censure
PHILIP WALTON moved that: “This meeting censures
the Council for the process used to appoint the editor of The Pharmaceutical
Journal”. He said that it was difficult for pharmacists who were not
involved in the political process to make sense of what was going on.
There had obviously been much concern surrounding Douglas Simpson’s resignation
and there were editorial freedom issues.
As far as appointing the best person for the job
was concerned, he had no qualms about that. Pharmacists had to prove themselves
in every aspect of their work fields, and that should include the editorship
of The Journal. Personally, he no longer thought that the meeting
should censure those responsible, but he felt he should propose the motion
on behalf of the 30 people whose signatures he had obtained in support
of a motion of censure.
MAURICE HICKEY, seconding the motion, said that
the whole appointment process was symptomatic of a democratic deficit
within the Society, whereby the members felt that they did not know what
was going on and that they had been disenfranchised by the secrecy that
surrounded the Council. Even if both motions were lost, the Council ought
to see it as a warning. Many members were unhappy simply because they
felt that they did not know what was going on.
At the request of the Vice-President, the SECRETARY
AND REGISTRAR gave the meeting a summary of the appointment process (PJ,
March 3, p284).
LEON PAGET (East Dulwich) said that the need to
remind the meeting about the process confirmed that members did not have
sufficient information to vote on the motion. This was another example
of lack of transparency and lack of communication.
MICHAEL BURDEN said that the membership could not
be involved in the detail of every appointment. The Council had done a
sensible job and had done it efficiently. He was delighted that there
was to be more corporate governance and new audit processes. This demonstrated
a Council that was addressing key issues and doing it efficiently.
PETER SCHOFIELD agreed with Mr Burden that the detail
was a management matter. But a change to a non-pharmacist editor after
160 years was a matter of extreme policy. The Journal was the only
means of dissemination to pharmacists en masse and the only way
that they had of letting their protests be heard. The process was deeply
flawed.
SULTAN DAJANI (Andover) said that, as a Council
member, he had to be careful what he said because much of the Council’s
discussion about the appointment had been private and confidential. However,
everything that had been raised had been accurate. On another point, every
system had to be fair and equitable and there had been concerns raised
by long-serving members of staff.
Flawed process
Mr Dajani agreed that the process was flawed. The
Council had not taken the decision to include the words “ideally a pharmacist”
in the advertisement, as Gordon Appelbe had pointed out at a Council meeting
in open business. The answer that had come back was that the job had been
opened up on the advice of a pharmacist specialist consultant. The idea
of the editor being a non-pharmacist was not the problem: the problem
was the process, which had taken many months from Douglas Simpson’s announcement
that he was to retire.
When it had come to ratifying the position, Council
members had not been told who had been selected. They had just been given
her credentials and asked to ratify the appointment. It had not been up
for debate. Council members had had an opportunity for their concerns
to be answered but they had had no choice other than to go for it. He
felt that he could say that strongly because he had voted against it.
PHILIP WALTON, summing up, said that a motion of
censure was a slapped wrist for the Council for not carrying the membership
with it.
The motion was then put to the meeting and was carried,
by 21 votes to 16.
Bringing the meeting to a close, the VICE-PRESIDENT
assured those present that the Council would be informed of the meeting’s
views when it next met.
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