| · The Society
· Community pharmacy
· Control of entry
· Complementary medicine
· Controlled drugs
· Diabetes
· Pharmacy in the US
Letters to the Editor
|
The Society
Rebalancing the integrated role
From Mr G. S. Phillips, MRPharmS
Your leading leading article “Wake
up call” (PJ, 19 August,
p208) and the general theme of that week’s issue are, in my experience,
both justified and accurate. Government rhetoric about developing pharmacy
practice in patients’ interests is just that. Despite the warm
words, things are getting worse, much worse, for the profession, and
patients and public are failing to benefit in any consistent way from
the potential of pharmaceutical care as a result. We now have postcode
pharmacy as well as postcode prescribing. As the oxygen debacle has so
graphically demonstrated, pharmacists’ professional interests are
inseparable from patients’ interests.
You call for the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee, the Department
of Health and the All Party Pharmacy Group to act. But you fail to make
the same demand of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. Why? Is it because
you, like much of the profession, have given up believing that the Society
has any appetite to do more than regulate?
The Society is uniquely qualified to fight for pharmacists’ professional
interests and, moreover, has a Charter obligation to do so.
I have consistently argued, and will continue to argue, that the Society’s
integrated role is a unique strength, but that the Society has got the
balance between “regulation” and “representation” badly
wrong. The Foster Report carries the implicit threat that the Society
will be shorn of its regulatory role. If that happens it will be political
thuggery at its most luddite. But there are many within the profession
itself (and, let me repeat, I am not among them) who fail to appreciate
the good and effective work the Society does on our behalf and argue
not only that a split is inevitable, but that it would be a benefit to
the profession. Clearly, we on Council have a lot of convincing to do,
and we must carry the profession with us.
For too long the Society has failed to call the Government to account
for promises made to the profession and not delivered. Now is the time
to stand up in the public interest and fight the profession’s corner.
I, for one, pledge to heed your wake-up call — and I ask that all
my Council colleagues do the same.
Graham Phillips
Member of Council
Royal Pharmaceutical Society
|
The
Pharmaceutical Journal