Bidding need not be forbidding

While a handful of pharmacists will be celebrating this week that their bids to become part of a medicines management pilot have been successful, many more pharmacists will be disappointed and wonder why they were part of the group of 90 bids that were unsuccessful, compared with the 26 winners.

Richard Seal, the medicines management services team leader at the National Prescribing Centre in Liverpool, is quoted as saying that a lot of work went into preparing the bids but the ones that really stood out were those where people from different professional backgrounds worked together on their application.

Clive Jackson, director of the NPC, told The Journal earlier this week that rejected bidders should not be too downhearted. They stood a strong chance of having their bids accepted either for the second wave of medicines management pilots to be decided later this year, or the third wave which will start next year. Moreover, they will have a chance to talk about their bids to members of the medicines management services team in the near future, in order to refine their submissions.

This effort, and the fact that everyone at the NPC involved with the pilots is at pains to emphasise the high quality of the first submissions, does not disguise the real problem. The majority of community pharmacists do not yet have a clue how to approach the bidding process. This is another skill that they have to pick up if they want to keep up.

And this is why we have concentrated on the bidding process in this issue. There is a news feature and an article from a chief pharmacist in a primary care trust that together, we hope, will give pharmacists a framework within which they can think about submitting a bid.

The truth is that it is not a difficult process, but it does require considerable preparation to be successful. If pharmacists take two points from this issue of The Journal, they are these: make sure the service is needed and make sure there is money for it. Provided bidders can demonstrate that the need exists from patients — and that without it patient care would suffer — and provided they have done their homework and found that the local primary care organisation has the funds available for extended pharmacy services, the process of putting the bid together is surprisingly straightforward.

The only other issue is one of confidence: many pharmacists will be intimidated by the very thought of putting up a bid. The answer is quite simple: do not try to do it alone; find like-minded colleagues in the locality; start with a small project, but think big.

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