The Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 267 No 7178 p839-846
15 December 2001

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Make managers visit pharmacies

Pharmacists have been urged to ask senior health managers to watch pharmacists at work after the chief executive of East Devon Primary Care Trust (Iain Tulley) spent a morning in a community pharmacy in Exmouth last week.

Mr Tulley was challenged to spend some time in a pharmacy after he addressed the inaugural meeting of the East Devon Pharmacy Development Forum in October. Alison Hayes, leader of the forum, said that at the meeting Mr Tulley had expressed support for pharmacy and said that he did not expect community pharmacists to be doing more work for less money.

On 5 December, Mr Tulley spent the morning at Lewis Pharmacy, Exmouth. Martin Lewis, one of the pharmacy's joint owners, said that while he was there Mr Tulley had spent some time in the dispensary. "He was able to see exactly what goes on. He was interested in the community monitored dosing system we use for nursing homes and we talked about how pharmacists might be paid for that in future. He was concerned about the level of wastage and returned medicines as well," Mr Lewis said.

"We tried to impress upon him that community pharmacy provides a better and more wide-ranging service that it is generally given credit for and that this cannot last under the current remuneration system."

Mr Lewis said that he would recommend that if other pharmacists could get similar health service managers to visit their pharmacies then they should do so.

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