The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 274 No 7352 p686
4 June 2005

Society summary

Questions raised by former Council member go unresolved

Questions directed to the President by a former member of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s Council remained unresolved at the annual general meeting on 24 May because the President did not have access to the answers.

Andrew Burr (Sutton Coldfield) asked for confirmation that an existing member of Council was currently under investigation by the Code of Conduct Committee.

The President replied that he was not aware of any such investigation.

[There is no reason why the President should be aware of a Code of Conduct investigation, because the complaints procedure requires complaints to be made direct to the chairman of the Conduct Panel (in an envelope marked “private and confidential”, forwarded by the Secretary and Registrar’s office). The chairman is elected by the panel itself, which consists of lay members of the regulatory bodies of other health professions.]

Mr Burr went on to ask whether the result of a Conduct Panel hearing would be made public.

The President replied that the Council would receive the report and then decide how to handle it.

[The agreed procedure for dealing with reports from the Conduct Panel is that they are considered in open Council business except where the panel has dismissed the complaint or has recommended referring the matter to the police (in which case no report is made public until the conclusion of any action by the police or prosecuting authorities).]

Mr Burr then asked when the Vice-President (Hemant Patel) had ceased to be a member of the Pharmaceutical Negotiating Committee. He said that there was a discrepancy between the information about Council members in the annual report and Mr Patel’s biographical details for the Council election.

The President said that if Mr Burr felt there was a discrepancy he should take it up with the individual concerned and not raise it during discussion on the annual report, which simply recorded what Council members had reported.

Earlier, during the discussion forum before the AGM, Mr Burr had commented that the Society’s draft new Charter had been gazetted by the Privy Council only once, when the Council submitted the original petition in December 2003, before his departure from the Council. The fact that the final version had not been gazetted meant that the Privy Council did not see any major changes of significance. Maybe the changes were not as significant as many people thought, he suggested.

The President said that Mr Burr was playing with words. The changes sought were essentially around one of the Society’s objects and around structures for involving the membership in certain Society decisions. Those changes were significant to pharmacists and to the Society. They were significant for the internal governance of the Council. The whole Council had agreed that those changes made the document acceptable. But they were also changes that the Council knew would not cause a problem to the Department of Health, the Privy Council and the Government. In terms of the Privy Council they were not significant enough to require regazetting.