The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 276 No 7391 p297
11 March 2006

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Pharmacists’ Defence Association

See a pharmacist — if there is one in

The profession’s ability to keep the public safe and provide an adequate pharmacy service may be compromised if pharmacists are allowed to leave the pharmacy, was the consensus among speakers. The government’s health bill introduced last year proposes critical changes in the provision of pharmacy services in the areas of personal control and supervision. The issue of remote supervision was discussed in a legal context but focused on the repercussions surrounding patient safety and customer service.

Joy Wingfield, professor of pharmacy law and ethics at the University of Nottingham, addressed the conference — entitled “Breaking the mould” — saying that, with the health bill, “we are having the mould broken for us … and rather unexpectedly”.

“We have a health bill with really quite radical proposals inside it,” she said. “And I think the implications require rather more mature reflection than we seem to have been given, with the arrival of the bill in Parliament last year.” Professor Wingfield said that the profession had some interest in allowing pharmacists to step away from their pharmacies and carry out activities. “The really major change is addressing what some have called an anomaly … that, of all health professionals, community pharmacists have traditionally been tied to their pharmacy premises for 37 years of legislation,” she said.

A concern for the profession, Professor Wingfield pointed out, was that much of the detail relating to changes in supervision would be left to secondary legislation “thrashed out by civil servants” and subject to perfunctory consultation.

David Reissner, of Charles Russell (solicitors) and a speaker at the session, said: “The devil will be in the small print. We will have to wait and see what the regulations say when the Departement of Health provides them.”

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s Statutory Committee has previously stated, according to Mr Reissner, that the public are entitled to expect that there will be a pharmacist on the premises who is available to give them appropriate advice.

Professor Wingfield said: “We have spent the past 10 to 15 years telling people to ask the pharmacist because they give good advice. We’ve played up the fact that you can get to see the pharmacist without an appointment. Now are we going to say, ‘Yes, you can see your pharmacist as long as he’s in’?”

“You won’t improve patient access [to professional advice] if the pharmacist isn’t there,” said Mark Koziol, PDA chairman.

Mr Koziol expressed concern over the role of technicians being stretched beyond its scope in the absence of a pharmacist. “We know,” he said, “if the pharmacist isn’t there … no matter how many standard operating procedures members of staff have got in that pharmacy, you are going to have members of the public expecting trained and competent, accredited technicians to go beyond their line of experience and their line of knowledge.”

In response to the premise that remote supervision would allow community pharmacists to develop their new clinical roles, Mr Koziol said that it would actually hamper the development of these clinical roles. “Nurses and other health care practitioners, will not have this responsibility and this baggage of trying to keep track of the pharmacy … while they are trying to operate a clinical service.”

Mr Koziol said that the PDA is in the process of intensively lobbying, which includes “contacting 40 patient groups … who will be detrimentally affected by these proposals, and … we are getting a much more positive response than we ever envisaged”.