The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 273 No 7315 p329
4 September 2004

Society summary

Code of ethics for technicians is published

A Code of Ethics for Pharmacy Technicians is published this week in a centre pull-out in this issue of The Journal. The code has been approved by the Council of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society following consultation on a draft code earlier in the year (PJ, 7 February, p165).

A final version of the code was presented to the Council at the August Council meeting by Patricia Hoare, chairman of the Council’s Law and Ethics Committee. She said that the code had been amended in the light of the response to the consultation exercise.

Mrs Hoare said that the committee believed that further work was required on two issues raised in the consultation. One was about rewriting the code — and also the pharmacists’ code, which it mirrored — in plain English. The other was the need to review the section on confidentiality. Because both those issues would take time to complete, the committee recommended that the Council should accept the proposed code for implementation when voluntary registration of technicians began on the on 1 January 2005. The issues of plain English and confidentiality would be addressed in preparing a subsequent update of both codes.

Asking the Council to adopt the redrafted code, Mrs Hoare pointed out that the main change was the replacement of detailed wording in Section A2 with more concise wording.

The President, Nicholas Wood, said that Section A2 was certainly more concise and did not muddy the waters with fine detail.