Society devolution group proposes English board
Each home country should have a new national board |
Separate boards for England, Scotland and Wales, which will provide strategic leadership and support for pharmacy practice development relevant to each home country, have been proposed by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s Devolution Review Group.
These proposals will be put forward for consultation with the membership
by the Society’s Council after its meeting in April when a full
plan will be drawn up.
The review group has also recommended that the national boards should
assist development of Council policy, promote pharmacy’s health
contribution, provide advice to government, NHS and health and social
care organisations, and support the Society’s branches.
The group’s main recommendations are summarised in the Panel.
Main recommendations of the devolution review group
· National boards should replace the current Scottish and Welsh
executives, along with a new national board for England
· Concordats should be developed between
the boards and the Council setting out agreed working
relationships
· The Statutory Committee should normally sit in London but be
prepared to convene elsewhere for reasons of language, law or public
interest
· Undergraduate and preregistration education should remain a GB
function with postgraduate education being a joint function with
the relevant national board
· European delegations from the Society should include a member
from each national board
· To avoid confusion with the Scottish Parliament’s Scottish
Executive, the executives should be renamed
· The director of the Society’s Scottish Department and the
secretary to the Society’s Welsh Executive should be formal
members of the Society’s executive group |
The
Society’s President, Nicholas Wood, said that the Society needs
to work flexibly to provide professional leadership and to meet the needs
of the different administrations. “This important report will help
us on that path and we are looking forward to further exploring how to
implement this vitally important work.”
Council member Douglas Simpson said: “The idea of having a body
within the Society to represent pharmacists politically in England is
an attractive one.
“Lord Fraser has made it clear that this body would have no regulatory
functions and so it should be able to promote pharmacists’ interests
without inhibition — always, of course, provided that it did not
act against the public interest.
“There are bodies in Scotland and Wales to represent pharmacists,
but no body to do the same job in England. This gap needs to be filled
and
Lord Fraser’s report shows us a way of doing it.” |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal
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