The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 274 No 7331 p12
1/8 January 2005

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· Drug donations
· CAM
· Pharmacy in Scotland
· Community pharmacy
· Prescribing
· Prosecution
· New contract (2)
· CPD
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· Barcodes
· Retention fee (2)
· New Year's resolutions
· The Society
· The Journal (2)

Letters to the Editor

Community pharmacy

SOPs miss the point

From Mr J. P. Smith, MRPharmS

I was surprised that there was no follow-up correspondence to the letter from Stephen Hadley (PJ, 4 December 2004, p814). He makes a valid point and gets a reply from Jackie Giltrow, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s chief inspector, passing the buck back to the incumbent pharmacist. The issue to my mind is that there is no definition of what is safe and what is not. Most locums, I suspect, can get the feel of whether they are in for a difficult day, or not, in the first 10 minutes in the pharmacy. Either the Society, through its inspectorate, knows that there is a serious problem in some areas and is not dealing with it robustly, or it does not know there is a problem, in which case it ought to. Using standard operating procedures as a means of improving things is, in my view, missing the point. I have not read in any SOPs: “If there is not an adequate staffing level in this pharmacy please close for the day and we will still pay your locum bill.” The point of SOPs is to be able to pull the rug from under any poor devil making a mistake who has inadvertently not dotted an “i” or crossed a “t”.

Paul Smith
Louth, Lincolnshire

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