The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 274 No 7342 p348
26 March 2005

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Let pharmacy be heard! more
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Let pharmacy be heard!

What is going on in the Department of Health? The latest review of the regulation of health professions announced last week, and encompassing all the professions except medicine, seems designed to be ineffective even before it has started work (p349). The three longer-established professional regulators, viz, pharmacy, dentistry and optometry, are excluded from the committee advising the review, save for places for the respective departmental chief officers for pharmacy and dentistry. On the other hand, the Nursing and Midwifery Council and the Health Professions Council each have two places. The DoH reasoning is that the recently established regulators represent a much larger number of practitioners (nearly 750,000 in total). As spurious arguments go, that is a fine example.

The President of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society has rightly written to the health minister, Lord Warner, expressing the collective dismay about this decision to exclude proper pharmacy input. This review has been prompted by Dame Janet Smith’s fifth report following the Shipman Inquiry in which she was highly critical of the General Medical Council’s efforts to restore public confidence in its impartiality. So it does seem strange to exclude pharmacy, which has so much experience of many of the challenges facing all health professions at the moment. Moreover, although health regulation is not devolved to the home countries, it is even stranger that input from Scotland and Wales is not found on the main advisory committee at all.

What conclusions can be drawn from this? That pharmacy, dentistry and optometry are already doing all the right things as far as the terms of reference for the review are concerned (see Panel, p349)? Surely if that were the case, the input from the three professions would be invaluable. Alternatively, is it a faint cry from an outgoing Government which, if and when a general election is announced and questions are asked about health regulators, can say it is doing all it can to help patients?

Whatever the reason, the DoH needs to offer a stronger case for excluding pharmacy, dentistry and optometry from the advisory committee than it has to date.

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Some pharmacists will no doubt want to comment on the outcome of the Statutory Committee inquiry into the case of Ghislaine Brant (p374). However, we will not be publishing any letters while the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence is considering the case. During this time we cannot accept any comment from Council members or prospective Council members because it is the Council that made the complaint against Mrs Brant under the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s governance arrangements. We believe therefore that any comment is likely to be one-sided and that would not be fair. We will consider letters on the matter once the CHRE has disposed of the case.

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