All life is here
Surprisingly, the opinions of correspondents to this week's issue of The Journal are not polarised, despite the frenetic events of the past few weeks. Bearing in mind the High Court exoneration of the previous Council for the way it had petitioned the Privy Council for a new Charter, the overwhelming success of the Save Our Society group in securing all seven places in the Royal Pharmaceutical Society's Council election, and the establishment of an entirely new team of Officers at last week's Council meeting, letters might have been expected to fall into one of two camps: those in support of the former Council and those cheering on the new.
Commentators, instead, cover a wide range of interpretations of the events
and put forward many future scenarios and suggestions (see pp764–8,
Broad Spectrum and Letters). They range from one writer who wishes to
see a return to pre-1933 days,
when the Society was just a representative body, to a commentator who
would not be surprised if the Government took regulation away from the
Society and left it as a voluntary membership body. Another writer argues
that representation should be taken over by a separate body and a further
correspondent just wishes the Council and the Society would stop navel-gazing
and worry about the issues that are of actual concern to practising pharmacists.
The SOS group united all those pharmacists who did not like what the former Council
was doing. However, among these pharmacists there are likely to be shades of
opinion on what solution would be desirable and, further, what would be acceptable.
One of the cornerstones when the Society started its long trek towards modernisation
was that the majority of the profession, as reflected in the responses to the
first consultation on modernisation in February 2002, wanted to maintain the
Society as a joint regulatory
and professional body. That is the path that the
Council of the time chose to pursue (PJ, 25 May 2002, p739) but, as the reality
has sunk in — and what it means in terms of the Government agenda — the
difficulty of keeping those two roles has led some pharmacists to question whether
it is the solution.
All these opinions reveal what a hard task the new Council faces. The new Council
must focus on what unites the profession and work towards a solution that will
give pharmacists most of what they expect and some of what they want.
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