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Letters to the Editor
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Community pharmacy
A responsive 21st century health care provider
From Mr J. Ash
I read your leading article, “Hopes for the high street” (PJ,
17 February, p177), with interest. We concur wholeheartedly with your
premise that the time is ripe for community pharmacy to realise its clinical
potential and prove that it is “more than just a retailer”.
As you concluded, it will need to go hand in hand with the financing
of clinical pharmacy services. There is, therefore, a challenge for both
pharmacy and the NHS.
Lloydspharmacy trusts that the new review of control of entry will provide
part of the answer to this and that the Department of Health will directly
address some of the issues that you highlight. For example, offering
more dedicated funding for pharmacy services, and allowing competition
between all primary care providers based on a common primary care trust
contract for services, from GP to pharmacist. Such opportunities should
be compelling to both independent pharmacy and the larger groups.
Furthermore, we believe that patient-focused care is best delivered by
bringing together a range of health care organisations to focus on, and
respond to, a community’s specific health care needs. Delivering
joined-up, practical and easy-to-access health care, particularly in
areas of under-provision or of high health inequality, is the future
for primary care in general, and especially for pharmacy.
Lloydspharmacy may be a major multiple, but we face the same space constraints
as the smaller operators to which you refer. We have taken the leap of
faith in the vast majority of our pharmacies, removed many of the “hair
products and tights” and focused our attention, and our staff’s
time, on clinical and diagnostic services. The transition is indeed difficult
but the rewards for our people, our patients and our business are now
being seen.
When this change is achieved throughout UK pharmacy, with rapidly improving
patient outcomes, we will all wonder why we ever thought the best way
to meet customer needs was to stock hairclips and 35mm film.
Justin Ash
Managing Director
Lloyds Pharmacy Ltd
Time to stop snipping strips of tablets and capsules
From Mr J. D. Thomas, MRPharmS
I am sure that pharmacy contractors will be disturbed and dismayed by
the increasing numbers of Statutory
Committee decisions in which pharmacists
have been either reprimanded or had their names removed from the Register
for “having the presence in their dispensaries, manufacturers’ boxes
containing strips of tablets and capsules, some of which had no batch
numbers and expiry dates” (PJ, 3 March, p265).
It is without doubt that every registered pharmacy premises will be guilty
of this offence since it is an integral part of the pharmacy NHS contract
that the exact quantity that is prescribed must be supplied, except in
the case of products supplied in special containers. As a result, community
pharmacists have become professional snippers of manufacturers’ original
strips of tablets and capsules.
Manufacturers’ strips have only one set of batch numbers and expiry
date. By snipping off the exact prescription amount, only one of these
two sections of the strip will contain these two pieces of information,
while the other will have no identification. In some cases, a single
tablet or capsule may not even have its product name visible.
Surely, now is the time for this anomaly to be eradicated by the Pharmaceutical
Services Negotiating Committee, acting as its name implies, to ensure
that pharmacy contractors can dispense and be remunerated for entire
and uncut strips, since it is now clear from these Statutory Committee
decisions that it is unprofessional to cut strips and we must now exert
our professional duty to safeguard the public.
The PSNC must grasp this chance to excel, but if it procrastinates then
once our Royal Pharmaceutical Society has been split into two, perhaps
the professional “royal college” body can act professionally
on community pharmacy’s behalf.
David Thomas
Patshull,
Shropshire
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The
Pharmaceutical Journal