The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 268 No 7201 p792
8 June 2002

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Confidence in the Council

This week sees the beginning of the trickiest part of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society's modernisation programme: how should the Council be reformed and in what ways?

We set the scene with two news features, an original paper, an article and a meeting report. In the coming weeks and months the debate will focus on whether or not the Council will assume all the responsibilities of modern regulation and look more like the councils of other regulatory bodies (see p797) or continue with its current make-up and devolve the regulatory responsibilities to a beefed-up Statutory Committee. The Government will also have a view on which structure it finds more acceptable.

At the heart of the debate is the question of representation. Clearly the members want the Society to continue to represent (PDF*, 55K) their professional interests (see p807). There is a body of opinion that this will best be achieved by retaining the status quo (see p809 and p822), and that there is no historical reasons or legal reasons for Council to change. The demands made by Kennedy can be absorbed by reform of the Statutory Committee. A Council with nearly as many lay members as professional members would not be representative and the Society would become a regulatory body with professional trimmings, downgrading its membership functions, so the argument goes.

In the coming weeks, an alternative voice will be heard: if the Council devolves regulatory responsibility to the Statutory Committee and any other committees that need to be established to fulfil the requirements of modern regulation, the Council will become toothless. Modern regulation covers so much of the Society's activities that an unreformed Council would find all its major policy decisions having to be ratified elsewhere. Members' and the public's interests will best be served if power is retained by a reformed Council, it is argued.

We have looked at another issue, as well. How well does the current Council's make-up represent members? Our analysis of the Council as just elected (p796) suggests that it roughly reflects membership groups, although there is no resident of Wales or individual working in industry, and there is a rather dominant group who also sit on the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee and the board of the National Pharmaceutical Association.

Whatever the outcome of the debate, the Council should at least be shaken up if it is to be truly representative and for options on this front it is worth studying the make-up of other regulatory bodies. If Council members genuinely put the profession's interest before their own, they could create a Council that serves the profession in a way that would give the membership total confidence.