The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 276 No 7398 p503
29 April 2006

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· Branded prescribing
· Antibiotics
· PSNC
· Medicines use reviews
· New technologies
· Boots/Alliance merger
· The profession
· Section 60 Order
· The Society (3)
· Information
· Health committee

Letters to the Editor

PSNC

Insulting obfuscation

From Mr D. R. Kent, MRPharmS

I cannot let the response by Sue Sharpe (PJ, 15 April, p439) to my letter go unchallenged. As usual the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee seeks to cover its position with spurious arguments. I doubt that my referring to statistics for England with Wales or Sue Sharpe referring to England only makes the slightest difference to the issue. There are, I am informed, few low dispensing volume non-LPS pharmacies in Wales, which has much higher average prescription numbers per pharmacy than England. The PSNC either has the data to confirm or refute this but chooses not to publish it or make it available to me, or it has told me at various times it does not hold data I have requested. If the latter is true then the PSNC has formulated and put forward a controversially biased remuneration model based on incomplete or unknown data; this is either deliberate, incompetent or, more damningly, both.

If we assume that the figures given by Sue Sharpe are correct, then what she is saying is that it is all right to destroy the viability of 100 pharmacies through the application of force majeure by the stronger. Notably, nowhere has she responded to the most basic questions I posed: on what is the 2,000 items per month measure of a pharmacy’s worth based and where did this figure come from? I now neither want nor expect an answer to these questions as there are no answers that would ever satisfy me and, furthermore, I do not think that rational answers exist.

Whether the livelihood of 100 or 400 pharmacies, or even one pharmacy, is destroyed, it is on the basis of a callous, arbitrary decision made by a small number of people who have little or no recent experience of the practice of pharmacy in this target group.

There is no dismissing of the point that the multiples’ block vote was instrumental in putting the current remuneration model in place, presumably in the full knowledge that they might lose at the bottom but would gain more of the available financial pot at the top. This luxury is not available to the 100, or perhaps 400, pharmacies whose future has been destroyed. This is morally unacceptable.

It is beneath the dignity of the PSNC and its chief executive to make a play on matters of lesser consequence while ignoring the major issues. They are insulting in thinking that I am naive enough to accept their obfuscation while forgetting that they have made no attempt to answer the most serious questions raised.

If you are a contractor dispensing, say, 2,500 items per month you should be asking if you are next on the PSNC hit list and start worrying now.

David Kent
Secretary
Camden and Islington Local Pharmaceutical Committee

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