Primary care pharmacist job losses to be quantified
Primary care pharmacists will find out later this summer how many of their jobs have disappeared because of recent budget cuts and NHS reorganisation.
The Primary Care Pharmacists’ Association announced this week that
it is surveying members in England to discover the effect on posts of
wiping out the last financial year’s NHS deficit and the merger
of primary care trusts. The PCPA intends to telephone as many PCTs as
possible in July and expects the results to be known by the end of the
summer.
The Pharmaceutical Advisors Group in England and Wales, representing
PCT pharmaceutical advisers, is also questioning its members about the
impact of PCT reorganisation, introduced last October. It wants to find
out how departments are now organised and whether PCTs are continuing
to employ pharmaceutical advisers. A questionnaire has gone to the group’s
regional representatives, who are being asked to pass it on to individual
PCT members.
At the same time, the Guild of Healthcare Pharmacists, which represents
mostly hospital pharmacists, wants to find out how many jobs have disappeared
in NHS trusts between 2006 and 2007 or have been frozen because of a
combination of Agenda for Change and budget cuts.
Shailen Rao: PCPA to survey members |
Shailen Rao, PCPA chairman,
said: “Whether [primary care] jobs
have gone because of the cuts or [through] PCT reorganisation doesn’t
really matter, but [we need] to find out where this has been happening.
Our members are crying out to find out what’s happening elsewhere
in the country.”
Helen Chadwick, PAG secretary and deputy chief pharmacist at Milton Keynes
PCT, said: “We want to discover where people are now and what the
set up is. We want to discover whether there are any gaps and whether
PCTs are employing advisers and support staff.”
President of the guild Anthony Oxley said morale across the NHS was low
because of the cuts and reorganisation. He said: “Every profession
in the health service feels bruised at the moment — I think morale
has been sapped across the board.
“It’s going to be quite difficult to get a figure for the
number of pharmacy job losses, but it is something we are working on
at a regional
level.”
The latest annual hospital pharmacist recruitment survey, covering the
whole of the UK, for the first time asked pharmacists to identify how
many posts they thought were under threat in the previous 12 months.
The question was added in the hope that the answers would reveal whether
the regrading of posts brought in by Agenda for Change had resulted in
job losses.
The results of the survey, carried out in May 2006, revealed that 2 per
cent of hospital jobs (122 pharmacist posts) were thought to be under
threat at that time. But since the figure only reflected anticipated
job losses brought about by Agenda for Change and not direct budget cuts
to balance the NHS books, the true number could be much higher, according
to David Scott, from John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, who carried out
the survey.
Recruitment feature p765 |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal
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