The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 268 No 7180 p15-21
5/12 January 2002

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Letters to the Editor

Community pharmacy (2 letters)

We should wake up and unite

From Mr K. H. Tee, MRPharmS

Why are we being treated so badly as a profession? The answer is our lack of unity. Another blow has just been delivered our way in the form of the remuneration cut for dispensing. Yes, I know it hurts but rather than spending our time blaming our professional selves in the guise of the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee, the National Pharmaceutical Association, the local pharmaceutical committee, our employer or the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, we should wake up and unite with a single mind. It is a thankless job representing pharmacists at the moment in any of the bodies mentioned.

Most community pharmacists are employee pharmacists, like myself. Our agenda may differ from those of our employers. So, for example, when certain organisations decided to back the abolishment of resale price maintenance, was it the voice of the non-pharmacist employer or was it the collective voice of the practising pharmacy professionals that we heard? The answer to our problem is to forget how many hats we have to juggle in running our daily lives, for there is only one hat that matters when the future of pharmacy is concerned and it is the pharmacy hat.

To help others, first we must help ourselves. We must stop casting pharmacy in subservient roles if our aspiration is to be recognised as an independent and dignified profession. How can this be when all our actions are dictated by our dependence on doctors? It is a joke when we are not even able to decide the form of a medication most appropriate to dispense to a patient without the authority of the prescriber. Tablets? Capsules? Expert in medicines? More upsets will also come our way if we keep on chanting "free more time for the GPs" without any practical solutions to free more time for pharmacists to pursue the various exciting and interesting roles available.

There is nothing we can do to alter the past or the present but the future is up to us.

K. H. Tee
Barnetby, South Humberside

Pharmacists need to be on board first

From Mr P. Jenkins, FRPharmS

At the recent, well-respected Proprietary Association of Great Britain debate, a prominent general practitioner made a point about making better use of pharmacists. Such comments are nice to hear but he appeared to be talking about using pharmacists to relieve the pressures of his workload. This could still be fine if it means pharmacists using their training in an active way, for example, in repeat medication reviews, but not so good if it means the GP just wants another helper he does not have to pay for.

This is the position with prescribing advisers and primary care pharmacists. These highly trained people work full-time on getting the drug budget down and advising on the best use of medicines to fit in with agreed policies. However, many GPs see them as helping to get their prescribing costs down just so that incentive schemes can be made to pay out. Hitting prescribing targets can be important healthwise and economywise, but for a GP to get an additional payment for doing his or her job properly does jar when the other workers involved get nothing extra when targets are met.

Furthermore for a GP to swap from one well-used product to another affects the pharmacy contractor's stock holding, but who cares about that? Only the contractor. It can all be justified if a better product is introduced even though the abandoned one may have been thought perfectly suitable for months. No contractor will argue with a well-thought-out, properly executed changeover.

The prescribing advisers' remit is to liaise with local community pharmacists and in the main they do carry this out. However, the transfer is rarely as smooth as it should be and the community pharmacist can often be the last in the chain to know, having being told by a patient.

It is encouraging to hear talk of working together from GPs' leaders. Such sentiments will only bear real fruit when there is true co-operation between the two sets of contractors at grassroots level and agreement on a schedule of changes, of course based on the advisers' advice, and when changes are properly signaled to patients. Only when the community pharmacist is on board from the beginning and knows the arguments can he or she be seen to be part of a team.

Peter Jenkins
Cardiff

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