The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 273 No 7316 p346-347
11 September 2004

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· Personal control
· Shipman
· Animal testing
· Charter
· Statins
· Cholesterol testing
· Media scrutiny
· Retention fee
· Enhanced services

Letters to the Editor

Cholesterol testing

Time to breathe

From Mr A. Low MRPharms

How strange it is that so many pharmacies are going in for cholesterol testing. The pharmacy day was already busy, at times intensely busy, from opening time to closing time and often beyond. Has common sense gone out of the window that we are volunteered to test cholesterol, often of people who are young, fit and evidently healthy? You can see the pressure piling onto managers and line managers as the figures for the numbers of tests performed and quantities of linked sales of fish oils and nicotine replacement therapy products are analysed in the light of commercial imperatives.

Did Jonny Wilkinson know what the advertising campaign was going to do to pharmacy staff and their stress levels when the publicity opened the floodgates, and all those customers piled in the doors, conscious of the health of their hearts and curious to know their cholesterol reading? I am sure it is a good thing, in many ways, to let customers know their number but it has already caused a lot of distress among staff, who were often under resourced anyway. Pharmacists and staff I have spoken to have usually been quite against such testing. Is this the new era in pharmacy? No-one I know has embraced it in the way that it should be embraced, as stated by C&D’s pharmacy forum (Chemist & Druggist, 31 July, p24).

Time to breathe in a pharmacy would be nice.

Andrew Low
Harrow, Middlesex

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