The Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 267 No 7161 p227-229
18 August 2001

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Community pharmacy

Power rests with employers

From Mr J. B. Paige, MRPharmS

The British Government has obviously decided that community pharmacists should take on new tasks within the health care field. What those tasks may be is not yet known (at least to us) but to prepare for the change the traditional role is being dismantled.

The end of resale price maintenance, lower payments for dispensing, more and more P-to-GSL shifts, central purchasing of generics, encouragement for internet pharmacies and other recent changes make it clear that pharmacists are to be removed from the medicine supply chain.

As all these measures bite, the result will be that within a few years all sales of medicines will take place from supermarkets and all dispensing will be carried out at large automated dispensing factories. The resulting large scale closure of community pharmacies will throw thousands of pharmacists out of work and make them available for new jobs at cheap rates.

Official flattery and professional ambition encourage the hope that pharmacists will become prescribers of treatments but this activity belongs to the politically powerful groups of doctors and nurses. They will never cede such an important function to mere pharmacists.

The most useful job that pharmacists could do, and the one which would make the best use of their expensive education, would be to make sure patients use the ever growing range of increasingly powerful medicines safely, effectively and cost efficiently. To do this job properly pharmacists would each have to specialise in particular areas of therapeutics because no one can be a true expert on the whole range of modern medicines.

Herein lies the real problem, because if pharmacists specialised they would each have different skills to offer to health authorities and these would have to be contracted individually. This would make life difficult for community pharmacy employers, who much prefer pharmacy to remain a homogenous profession where any pharmacist can be replaced by any other pharmacist.

Most of the power within the pharmacy profession rests not with the members but with the employers and as long as this remains true pharmacists are unlikely ever to be paid a fair rate to do a useful and rewarding job for the benefit of the community.

J. B. Paige
Guernsey, Channel Islands

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