“Think more radically,” says chief pharmaceutical officer
In his first speech to community pharmacists as chief pharmaceutical officer for England, Keith Ridge urged the profession to “think more radically”, particularly in terms of supervision.
Dr Ridge was speaking to participants at the AAH Pharmaceuticals convention
in Athens this week and said that pharmacists should not be afraid of
the principles currently being proposed in the Health Bill around supervision
and the new role of the responsible pharmacist. “You should embrace
them as individual professionals and use them to deliver important improvements
in patient care,” he said. “What we can’t have is clinical
and cost-effective improvements in patient care being held up by a reluctance
to think differently or create innovative solutions.”
Dr Ridge stressed that patient safety is paramount, but said that, as
a profession, pharmacy needs to change to deliver new front-line clinical
roles, some of which may be away from the dispensary.
He believes that through innovation, such as developments in IT, it will
be possible to achieve this while maintaining availability of pharmacy
advice to the public.
“I guess it is about developing a more flexible and open, but still
safe, approach to practice, where you as practitioners have the confidence
to know that all is well back at base while you are elsewhere caring
for patients,” he explained.
He added that he does not believe that there will be pharmacies without
a pharmacist in the future. “If pharmacists need to be present
in the pharmacy to provide NHS services then that can be addressed through
the NHS contract for community pharmacy. No change to primary legislation
is needed to enable that,” he said.
Meeting report p683 |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal
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