The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 277 No 7417 p319
9 September 2006

Society summary

Statutory Committee declines to hear a case that is eight years old

A pharmacist convicted of dishonesty has escaped punishment by the Statutory Committee after the committee decided that it could not hear an inquiry eight years after the offence.

The chairman, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, QC, said that if the committee were to consider the case and it ended up before the European Court of Justice, he had little doubt that the court would tell the committee that it should not have heard the case at all because the pharmacist had suffered undue delay. He added that the committee did not want to hear any cases more than four years old.

The case, which was brought before the committee’s June meeting by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, concerned a pharmacist who in January 1999 had pleaded guilty before magistrates to three counts of dishonesty and one of attempted dishonesty during the first half of 1998. He had been given a community service order for 80 hours and ordered to pay compensation of more than £500 to his employer, plus costs of £55.

The delay in bring the case to the committee had occurred because the convictions had only come to the Society’s attention when the pharmacist filled in the Society’s new-style retention fee form, which asked members to give details of convictions.

Giving the committee’s determination after staying the case, the chairman said that, regardless of its merits, the committee would not hear the inquiry. He emphasised that there was no criticism of the Society in that decision. There was no way the Society could have known about the offences until last year, but eight years was quite out of any time-scale that the committee could accommodate.

The chairman went on to ask the Society to examine all outstanding cases because if any comparable cases were on the list, the committee would be consistent and would simply not hear them. He said: “We really do not want to hear conviction cases before us, whether the plea is guilty or otherwise, if they are anything like this sort of age. I doubt whether we can properly hear anything that is more than three or four years old, particularly in the circumstances where a pharmacist is now under an ethical obligation to say to the Registrar whether or not he or she has got a conviction or even been reported for an offence.”

Noting that the pharmacist had incurred costs, with no way of recouping them, the chairman added that, under the Society’s proposed new disciplinary procedures, the future disciplinary committee would be able to award expenses if it regarded a complaint as vexatious or out of time. But, whatever its view at the moment might be, the current committee had no such power.