The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 278 No 7448 p445
21 April 2007

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Monitoring of P medicines sales needs to improve

The proposed reclassification of pseudoephedrine and ephedrine demonstrates that the monitoring of sales of pharmacy-only medicines needs to improve, Roger Walker, consultant in pharmaceutical public health at the National Public Health Service for Wales, says in a letter published this week.

Pharmacists believe the proposed reclassification has raised questions about their ability to supervise sales of P medicines, he says, but this could have been avoided. “Perhaps as a profession we should have acknowledged that there was a potential problem and reinforced the existing measures to demonstrate that our supervision was robust enough to protect public health,” he writes.

Improving the supervision and monitoring of sales of P medicines could, he says, have deflected attention from the need for reclassification. “In the future we must ensure that we have a better system in place to protect the public from the misuse of over-the-counter medicines,” he argues.