The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 270 No 7240 p366
15 March 2003

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Letters to the Editor

Community pharmacy

What is quality dispensing?

From Mr R. Gartside, FRPharmS

You reported Lord Hunt as saying that the Government needs to drive pharmacists towards a higher quality of service, and this raises the question as to what is meant by "quality of dispensing service" (PJ, 8 March, p321).

Pharmacists only need to do three things to prosper. First they should smile at the patients and take a personal interest in them. Second, they should have the patient's medication in stock. Third, they should accurately dispense the prescription as rapidly as reasonably possible so that patients are not kept hanging around. These are the only criteria which patients have to judge the quality of a dispensing service.

By following these criteria the prescriptions dispensed by my little group of pharmacies in the 1970s went up by 10 per cent per year. I would strongly suggest that such growth is probably as good an indicator of the quality of a dispensing service as one can get.

But we can be sure that Lord Hunt has something else in mind because patient satisfaction is not easily measurable and there is no evidence from the remainder of the National Health Service that our rulers have any interest in patients' experiences. Elsewhere, "quality" is measured by a number of ersatz indicators like bed occupancy rates, which may not have any association with patients' perceptions of real quality. Similarly the Office of Fair Trading recently used for its investigations of community pharmacy a set of arguable "quality indicators" which had only the most tenuous connections with real quality.

We as a profession need to be careful before agreeing to any set of "quality indicators". It might be a good idea to develop a set of our own in readiness for negotiations to come.

Might I suggest that we begin by studying workloads since it seems unlikely that quality work can come from overworked people.

Bob Gartside
Llanberis, Caernarfon

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