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Letters to the Editor
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Modernisation
It is not self-regulation
From Mr D. Simpson, FRPharmS
You drew attention last week to High Court action by the Council for the
Regulation of Healthcare Professionals against disciplinary decisions by
health regulators (PJ, 3 April, p403). You suggest that “this signals
an end to professional self-regulation as it has been known” (ibid,
p402).
In reality, self-regulation has already gone in most health professions.
It went with the addition of large numbers of lay people to regulatory
bodies. We now have, in the words of Finlay Scott (chief executive of the
General Medical Council), not self-regulation “but professionally
led regulation in partnership with the public” (Today programme,
BBC radio, February 28).
The GMC has around 40 per cent lay membership. The Council of the Royal
Pharmaceutical Society is heading the same way with the new Charter proposals,
so we, too, would be subject to the partnership approach. Not only that,
as the action of the CRHP has demonstrated, the regulators in their new
guise will be subject to the active scrutiny of an over-arching quango
in the form of the CRHP, which, as it has already demonstrated, will be
far from benign.
If ever there was a time that pharmacy needed a strong, independent, representative
association promoting the interests of its members this is it. Unfortunately,
that role would largely be sacrificed as the Society seeks to modernise
with the aim of preserving self-regulation when, as Mr Scott has made clear,
it is not self-regulation at all.
Douglas Simpson
Beckenham, Kent
Member of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s Council |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal