The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 278 No 7452 p585
19 May 2007

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• White paper (5)
• Dispensing errors
• Insect bites and stings
• Community contract
• Locum pharmacy
• Pseudoephedrine
• The Journal (2)

Letters to the Editor

Community contract

Surveys are not helpful

From Mr A. R. Korsner, MRPharmS

Today I saw the survey form that pharmacies are required to ask customers to complete under the new contract. The third question asks about the customer’s degree of satisfaction with the time it took to get their prescription. Due to the way in which many patient’s minds work this means that pharmacies offering counselling with prescriptions, those in which the pharmacists make the effort to contact the prescriber if there is a query and those that spend time sourcing difficult-to-get items will be seen as deficient, while those doing a quick labelling and bagging service will come up tops.

Although it is important that we are aware of our customer’s impressions, surely it is not right that we have to be responsible, rather like turkeys voting for Christmas, for collecting the data and paying for the privilege ourselves.

We are so often the victims of poll-sampling by the likes of Which? magazine, why can the Department of Health not get an independent organisation to carry out the survey? They could spend time explaining delays and such to the customers thus making the relevance of the survey more meaningful.

Pharmacists, no longer considered to have the safety or expertise to make their own extemporaneous products, are now seen to have switched roles and qualified to be survey conductors instead.

Another example of our negotiators detachment from reality.

Adrian Korsner
London

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