The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 270 No 7210 p190-192
10 August 2002

This page
Reprint
Photocopy

PDF* 35K

  The Journal
  The Society
  

Letters to the Editor

The Journal

Why Wales is so different

From Mr C. Ranshaw, FRPharmS and Mr V. G. Fenton-May, FRPharmS

We are dismayed by your editorial “What’s wrong with Wales?” with reference to the pharmacy plan for Wales (PJ, 27 July, p120). For an editorial to ask this question in a Great Britain professional journal shows a misunderstanding of devolution and what devolved government aspires to. The question should have been “What is different in Wales?” followed by reasoned constructive journalism discussing the issues.

Devolution is to allow government appropriate to the needs of the people of Wales, not England nor Scotland. The National Assembly for Wales has a Health and Social Services Committee comprising Assembly members from all political parties within the Assembly. This is unique in two ways, first, it covers both health and social services and secondly, it delivers through consensus government and not in the old fashioned way of adversarial politics. This committee will deliver on the health needs and the social care needs of the people of Wales. As the policy is all-inclusive and crosses over party lines it will be a long lasting policy that will not change after each election if there is a power shift in government.

Wales will not enter a race with England or Scotland and deliver a poor programme based on the needs of those two countries. We will get the health and social services programme absolutely right for Wales and it will be a programme that all the professions and politicians are signed up to. Pharmacy is just one part of the overarching programme, and this piece of the jigsaw can only be fitted in when the overall picture is drawn.

To put it in simplistic terms, to aid future editorials, we will use the analogy of building a house. The “house” is the overall policy and is still in the design stage, ie, the draft plan, and is still to be built, ie, the final plan, and pharmacy has a main room in the house, which happens to be the kitchen. Now the pharmacy plan is the fitted kitchen, but we cannot draw up a final specification until the kitchen and house is built. We can however, as we have, have the basic requirements for a kitchen that is fit for purpose. That fitted kitchen, however, will have to deliver services to other parts of the house and until we all know what is in each room and how we interconnect it would be foolhardy and premature to put one profession’s plan forward in isolation. If pharmacy did this, it may not fit the kitchen and it would be wrong to leave new fittings outside the house to deteriorate, wasting valuable resources in the process.

We will work together with all professions in Wales and we will all deliver together.

Editorials of this nature are most unhelpful as they can be divisive and destroy the hard work of dedicated individuals in Wales. This editorial is not worthy of a professional journal.

Colin Ranshaw
V’Iain Fenton-May
Cardiff

Send your letter to The Editor

Next Topic (The Society)