The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 275 No 7357 p34
9 July 2005

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Keep the members engaged more
Last chance to send in retention fee ideas more

Keep the members engaged

With just over a week to go before the close of the consultation on the establishment of national boards for the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, there has been relatively little response to the proposals in the columns of The Journal — although we do carry one letter this week (p45).

The pharmacy politicians are in no doubt: without three separate bodies to drive professional strategy and policy forward in the three home countries, the Society would lose out as NHS developments diverge (PJ, 2 July, p30).

The profession should be fully aware that to provide the sort of service that will enable it to respond to consultations and policy changes in the three home countries in an appropriate way will carry a price tag.

How many members of the Society will have registered that the costs of having an enlarged Council — now with 30 members — will inevitably add some burden to the coffers? If, in addition, there are three separate boards to support there will be further costs to accommodate. The establishment of a modern regulatory and professional body will not be inexpensive and, eventually, however economically the new structures are put together, the membership is likely to have to pay for them in some way or other.

This is not to argue that these new structures should not be established. Far from it. They are critical for the future success of the Society. However, the new Council has a responsibility to ensure that when it makes an essential decision to spend members’ money, it does its best to engage them.

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Last chance to send in retention fee ideas

Sometimes The Journal wants to weep. We have carried many letters (over 100) about the new structure to the Register and the apparent unacceptability of the fees imposed in 2005. We have been admonished by Council candidates for allegedly refusing to continue the correspondence and “censoring” letters (PJ, 2 April, p393). So we might have hoped that, having invited members to put forward constructive ideas on how the system could be made more equitable (PJ, 18 June, p748), we would have been inundated with suggestions. To date we have received fewer than 20.

As it happens, the invitation — designed to inform the Resources Management Committee’s deliberations on 6 July — can be extended. The RMC meeting has been postponed so The Journal will be publishing ideas next week, instead of this week as originally planned. So there is still time for everyone who complained about the structure to send us ideas.

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