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	The Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 270 No 7252 p793 7 June 2003	This page Reprint Photocopy
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Letters to the Editor

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The Society

Council members and CPD

From Mr. K. M. Youings, MRPharmS

The response from the education division to the question of whether Council members must be on the active register (PJ, 24 May, p719) suggests that the changes envisaged at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society go much further than has been published to date, and is increasingly disturbing. Does it follow that those on the inactive register, who will lose representation rights, also lose their voting rights? It seems improbable that a group of members could have voting rights and yet be restricted as to whom they could vote for, especially as none of the candidates for election to Council need have the slightest interest in anything other than "active" members.

Already we know that the register is to be split. How long will it be before the Society only represents community practice and some hospital pharmacists? Perhaps this is what is behind the need to have a new Charter. Under the present one, the Society has to work for the benefit of all pharmacists, including industrial, academic, agricultural and veterinary etc. These are seen as branches of the profession, with their own special interest groups.

It is surely time for the full truth to be told. So please, Council, put your cards on the table and tell the membership the whole truth instead of the modern "tell a bit, leak a bit, deny a bit" approach. If there is a future for the "inactive pharmacist" as a member of the Society, what is it? There is no CPD that counts for us other than the weekly articles in the PJ (and, since that may not fit into our individual CPD plans, even that probably does not count) or other private study. The PJ is available online. So apart from wanting our money, why would the Society wish to retain members on an "inactive" register?

K. M. Youings
Romford, Essex

Dr ROBERT DEWDNEY, head of education, Royal Pharmaceutical Society, replies:

Any pharmacist member of Council will, by their work in Council and committee meetings, be active in the broad practice and science of pharmacy and thereby subject to the envisaged CPD-submission requirement. He or she would not be able to sustain a statement that he is not so active, in order to move to the non-practising part of the Register.

On the final point in the letter, "Why have an inactive register?", the Council has sought to preserve a way for long-time members of the Society to remain so if they wish, even though they may have retired from all paid or voluntary work in or related to pharmacy. Putting these pieces together, a pharmacist on the non-practising register could stand for Council and receive votes from pharmacists on the non-practising register as well as from pharmacists on the practising register but if he were elected to Council, given the nature of the work involved, he would have to, with some alacrity, move to the practising register and become subject to the CPD requirement.

By his general tenor, Mr Youing's appears to be under a misapprehension that someone at the Society has made a policy distinction between patient care (community and hospital) and other forms of pharmacy practice and science. In fact, as has been clearly and repeatedly stated in the PJ, the Council has consciously eschewed such a distinction.

It is worth pointing out that all the Council's proposals on CPD enjoyed strong support (PDF 55K) within the recent consultation with the membership (PJ, 29 March, p456).

Finally, readers might be interested to note that Council members were among the first to whom CPD was rolled out in October last year and that they will be among the first to submit records when CPD becomes mandatory.

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