The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 277 No 7407 p5
1 July 2006

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S60 Order “a wasted opportunity” to ensure public safety, says PDA

Plans for the future regulation of pharmacy are a wasted opportunity to ensure the enhanced safety of the public, the Pharmacists’ Defence Association has told the Department of Health.

Commenting (PDF 560K) on the draft Section 60 Order (PDF 2.8MB) on the future regulation of pharmacy, the PDA says that the safest industry in the world is the airline industry, which ensures that the cause of any problem is the focus of any investigation.

“Unlike this safety orientated approach, the draft Order primarily focuses on seeking to find individuals to blame in the event that something goes wrong. Much of the draft Order is about punishment and exclusion, whereas it should have focused primarily on learning, supporting and inclusion,” says the PDA.

The PDA also criticises the draft Order for proposing little power to deal with pharmacy companies, which are the organisations that dictate the working environment for many pharmacists and pharmacy technicians.

“The Order has powers to suspend registrants, but does not have the power to even temporarily close a pharmacy while the most basic safety improvements are put into place,” the PDA says. “This significant omission means that the Order will fail to have an impact on the causes of many of the problems.”

Like the National Pharmacy Association, the PDA believes that the link between membership of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and registration as a pharmacist should be broken. It sees no grounds for believing that a Society member who is not a registered pharmacist could mislead the public and practise as a pharmacist.

But the PDA goes further still and says that the regulator should have three registers, rather than the planned two. As well as a list of practising pharmacists whose work impacts on the public and a list of non-practising pharmacists, the PDA says there should be a third list comprising practising pharmacists whose work does not impact on the public. This could include those involved in research, head office functions and journalism, for example.

Also, like the NPA, the PDA opposes consideration of the attitudes and behaviours of prospective registrants, because of the problem of defining what is a correct attitude or behaviour.

Although the PDA agrees that the Society should be able to seek information about a pharmacist’s fitness to practise (FTP), it is concerned that the proposed power could be used by the Society for a wide trawl to see whether a potential FTP issue could be dredged up whenever it is investigating any complaint. This is a tactic that the PDA says it has already seen the Society use against FTP defendants. The PDA says that what it calls general fishing exercises should not be permitted except in the most serious cases and that the Society should not be able to seek information from professional defence services, error reporting schemes, lawyers and doctors with a confidential relationship with defendants or family members.