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The Society
Letters to the Editor
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The Society
Members should reject new sample Charter
From Dr A. S. Hersom, FRPharmS
The Hull Branch Committee met recently to discuss the new sample Charter
and questionnaire.
We believe that it is vitally important that members send a clear message
to the Council that existing Charter Objective 3 (to maintain, honour,
safeguard and promote the interests of the members in their exercise
of the profession of pharmacy) must be retained and that members should
reject the new sample Charter using the questionnaire (downloadable as
a PDF file
(20K)) by the end of August.
The number of people who gave up a Sunday in June to attend and overwhelmingly
vote against the Council’s modernisation proposals at the special
general meeting significantly outnumbered all the people who attended
the 12 regional roadshows. This demonstrates the depth of feeling against
the new sample Charter.
A. S. Hersom
Secretary,
Hull and District Branch
Royal Pharmaceutical Society
Embracing devolution
From Mr C. Ranshaw, FRPharmS
As secretary and branch public relations officer to the Cardiff and
Vale Branch with over 600 members, I receive regular mailings from the
Royal
Pharmaceutical Society headquarters in Lambeth.
Recently I have received “Better management of minor ailments:
using the pharmacist” with a supporting letter from the President
commending the publication. Although the principle and generality of
this publication is superb it fails abysmally on the detail. Throughout,
reference is made to primary care trusts, which do not exist in Wales
or Scotland.
The President has expressed her delight that Dr David Colin-Thomé has
endorsed and written the forward to the publication. Again I have the
greatest respect for Dr Colin-Thomé, but even he has only commended
the publication to PCTs. Still, I would not expect any other endorsement
from the national clinical director for primary care, Department of Health.
The DoH is England only, PCTs are England only. We are the Royal Pharmaceutical
Society of Great Britain, not England.
We are now put in the difficult position of having a good publication
that is perceived to be irrelevant in Wales. I would be hard pressed
to take this to the minister for health and social services in the National
Assembly for Wales for her to endorse its adoption. It is just not credible
to take forward an English-based document that completely ignores the
NHS (Cymru) Wales structures.
It would have been so easy for the authors of this report to make it
generic by referring, for example, to primary care organisations in all
three home countries.
The latest publication I have received is “Beyond the baseline:
the role of clinical facilitators working with community pharmacists”,
written by Catherine Dewsbury, clinical governance pharmacist, Royal
Pharmaceutical Society. This is another document written with that prevailing
culture, ie, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of England. When will Lambeth
become less anglocentric and realise that devolved government occurred
in 1999 and, like it or not, Wales and Scotland are responsible for the
NHS policies, strategies and administration in their own countries, not
the DoH?
I would like all pharmacists to recognise that there are differences
within the NHS in each of the three home countries and that we are moving
at different rates and sometimes in different directions. However, what
seems to be problematical is to get the Society to embrace devolution
seriously.
It does concern me greatly that at this time, when we have had much debate
about the dual role of the Society, two excellent examples of the professional
activity of the Society will not be of use in Wales. The annual retention
fees of all pharmacists are being used to produce these professional
documents and they should therefore be in a form that will be applicable
to all pharmacists in Great Britain.
Colin Ranshaw
Secretary,
Cardiff and the Vale Branch
Royal Pharmaceutical Society
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BEVERLEY PARKIN, director of public affairs and communications,
Royal Pharmaceutical Society, replies:
Colin Ranshaw highlights a
feature of the growing reality of devolution, which is creating
different priorities and developments in each country. Increasingly,
the Society
and other organisations are recognising the need to respond to
this by identifying those generic issues that apply to the whole
of Great
Britain and those that are relevant in one or more of the individual
countries.
In the latter case, this requires us to address country-specific
issues with material that reflects the realities of increasingly
devolved health service
provision. The two documents to which Mr Ranshaw refers were both specifically
designed to address audiences in England. With a foreword by the national director
for primary care for England, the briefing on minor ailments aims to showcase
emerging schemes to the primary care trusts in England. The clinical governance
document was also designed for an English audience and was produced to meet
the needs of community pharmacy clinical governance facilitators
who are being recruited
to PCTs across England.
To meet the specific needs of the circumstances in Wales and Scotland, the
Society’s
Welsh and Scottish Departments have taken up the opportunity of producing appropriately
worded and targeted documents for use in these respective countries. Such briefing
papers have enjoyed considerable success with audiences in Wales and Scotland.
In some circumstances, different approaches may be deemed more useful, depending
on the issue, the prevailing political climate, the national policy implementation
timetable and priorities in those countries. |
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