The Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 267 No 7168 p461-463
6 October 2001

This page
Reprint
Photocopy

  OTC medicines
  Primary care pharmacy
  The Profession
  Community pharmacy
  Abbreviations
  Overseas registration

Primary care pharmacy (2 letters)

Outdated and unhelpful comments

From Ms V. G. Ward, MRPharmS

Heartened though I was by Dr Jim Smith’s comments concerning primary care pharmacy (PJ, 29 September, p414) I was dismayed to read Bill Scott’s comments. I have worked in primary care as a practice-based pharmacist and then as a primary care group adviser over the past two years and can only assume Mr Scott’s comments to be a woeful display of a lack of understanding of the role and skills required for this important area of pharmacy practice.

Primary care pharmacy is a necessary and important provider of pharmaceutical care that should work alongside community pharmacy and hospital pharmacy to ensure patients really do get the best from their medicines, minimising waste where possible, while allowing clinical governance to be facilitated, improving quality of prescribing, helping with the implementation of the national service frameworks and clinical guidances, reducing risk (clinical and financial) and providing or facilitating education and training for all practice staff.

The primary care pharmacists I know are committed to patient care and medicines management, providing services to patients and health care professionals in the practice setting. These pharmacists come from a variety of backgrounds — hospital and community — and some still work part-time within these other sections of pharmacy.

At one of the UK Clinical Pharmacy Association workshops at the spring 2001 symposium, community pharmacy colleagues were generally positive about practice pharmacists and about having a like-minded individual who is accepted as part of the practice team to help with prescribing problems encountered and facilitate seamless care for patients. They did not appear to feel threatened or usurped by them.

I believe there is a need for all these areas of pharmacy and that primary care pharmacy is best provided in a structured way through primary care organisations to ensure corporate standards and appropriate governance.

Mr Scott’s comments are outdated and unhelpful as we start working and liaising more closely within all areas of pharmacy to “optimise patient benefit”, “minimise waste” and provide access to pharmaceutical care in a “range of locations” as detailed in the Collaborative National Medicines Management Services Programme. If we are to achieve this, it is important that we all work together, communicate more effectively and value each other’s contribution.

Ginny Ward
Acting Lead Prescribing Adviser,
Southampton West and Test PCG

A degree of ignorance about progress in Scotland

From Mr M. R. Hickey, MRPharmS

The editorial in The Pharmaceutical Journal (29 September, p414) shows a degree of ignorance regarding pharmacy’s progress in Scotland and the message that our Chief Pharmaceutical Officer was giving.

If some primary care pharmacists were paid to come and work in my pharmacy and release me to undertake “other work” that might be a step forward. The fact that community pharmacists do not do this work has little to do with the general level of ignorance in our field. It is more to do with the fact that we are unable through the constraints of finance and time to undertake it. I do not believe that Bill Scott was saying we should get rid of primary care pharmacists, simply that their talents might be used more constructively in community pharmacy, reinforcing the truest strength of pharmacy, namely that it is accessible to, and involves much interaction with patients. The point Bill Scott was making, I believe, was that we need a fully integrated pharmaceutical service and he was reflecting that many of us are concerned that we are breaking up into elitist tribes. He was suggesting instead that we should all be working together and not against each other — all of us working together to improve patient care.

That our CPO is out of touch with pharmacists in his own country is far from from the truth. I have met and corresponded with Bill Scott several times. I have never found him to be anything other than approachable, courteous and open to “other” ideas. The progress we are making in Scotland is due to a number of hard working individuals, but this progress would be impossible if it were not for a CPO who is most certainly not out of touch with his constituency. Furthermore, every community pharmacist I have spoken to is relieved that a pharmacist in a position of real power is willing to stand up for them in public. Pharmacy in Scotland is changing, and it is moving away from the model being promulgated in England. This is rarely reflected properly in the PJ. I believe your editorial was written with unfortunate haste and was written by someone who, either through ignorance or prejudice, has little understanding of pharmacy in “North Britain”.

Maurice Hickey
Forres, Morayshire

Back to Top

Previous Topic (OTC medicines)
Next Topic (The Profession)
Send your letter to The Editor