|
Prescription charges
Community pharmacy
Medical research
Remuneration
Advertising
Primary care
Fluoridation
The Society
Letters to the Editor
|
Primary care
Primary care pharmacists are not leaving the profession
From Dr B. P. Curwain, MRPharmS
The reported comments made by Royal Pharmaceutical Society Council member
Wally Dove and Professor Liz Kay at the British Pharmaceutical Conference
(PJ, 27 September, p414) serve only to show how misinformed and out of
date some senior pharmacists can be about the work done by primary care
pharmacists. If you were to tell any member of the New Forest Primary
Care Trust’s medicines management team that they are “part-time
accountants” who are “doing little to improve the quality
of prescribing”, you would receive a most robust although, of course,
courteous reply.
We constantly strive to improve both the process and practice of prescribing,
have fought with the accountancy-minded factions of the National Health
Service to get proper funding for the drugs our patients need and have,
in my PCT, removed budgetary performance from the prescribing incentive
scheme in favour of quality indicators. In the current year we have increased
funding for GP prescribing by 19 per cent. My PCT does not have a formulary.
We spend as little time as possible in our offices and as much as we
can out with doctors, pharmacists, nurses and others, including, in my
case, patients. In many PCTs the pharmacy team are the only clinicians
among the paid headquarters staff. As such, we are able to provide an
effective and sympathetic link between NHS managers and the clinicians
who deliver the services. We do encourage the use of new drugs when appropriate
but are increasingly mindful of the evidence base for such decisions.
Nobody likes to see public money wasted and we try to maximise the effectiveness,
first in terms of therapeutics and second in terms of cost, of the medicines
that are used. Pharmacists have been spectacularly successful since the
mid 1990s at containing rising costs but the main easy changes have,
mostly, already been made and prescribing is now quality-driven via national
service frameworks and National Institute for Clinical Excellence guidance.
It is depressing to see how little the Society seems to know about what
we do, including struggling to develop community pharmacy services. Many
of my primary care colleagues believe Lambeth to be largely irrelevant
to them, which it is not, but their view is understandable.
Brian Curwain
Chief Pharmacist and Head of Primary Care
New Forest PCT
|
* PDF files on PJ Online require Acrobat
Reader 4 or later.