The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 279 No 7471 p338
29 September 2007

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More equal than others?

Open Day: not all the usual suspects

More equal than others?

Members of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society who have been following the Pharmacy 2020 articles that The Journal has published over the past two months may be disappointed to learn that the series comes to an end with this week’s contribution. The authors of these articles hold strong opinions and, arguably, include some of the most influential pharmacists in Britain. The Journal would expect the pieces to remain relevant for many years and it will be interesting to revisit the themes in 2020 to find out how perspicacious the writers have been.

With that in mind, it is hard to dismiss the views of Clive Jackson, director of the National Prescribing Centre, who is the final contributor (p365). Far from allowing the series to end with a whimper, his article makes for rather uncomfortable reading, and suggests that the profession may be moving towards a schism.

Pharmacists who rely on old-style pharmacy practice underpinned by dispensing income for their livelihood — “dispensing traditionalists” — may be squeezed by other health care professionals who see there are opportunities for them in the clinical arena, and by support staff who are prepared to develop their own skills and roles to undertake the traditional responsibilities more cheaply.

So the future for pharmacy, Mr Jackson suggests, lies with the “clinical modernists”. “We should remember,” he writes, “that … both medicine and pharmacy emerged, as separate professions, out of the original combined role of the apothecary — could we be approaching a new, equally seismic (and not dissimilar) fracturing of the pharmacist’s role?”

If that is not enough to shake pharmacists up, we also carry a Broad spectrum article (p348) in which it is argued that locums may be an endangered species unless they, too, adopt some of the habits of the “clinical modernists”, as well as being au fait with the pharmacy market, their local health care economy and how the NHS really works.

We will have to wait to find out how the traditionalists and the modernists will work together and whether, as Mr Jackson suggests, some become more equal than others.

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Open Day: not all the usual suspects

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s Open Day seems to have been well received by those pharmacists and guests who travelled to Lambeth last weekend to hear from the Society’s Council and staff and to learn more about what goes on there (p363).

Although some faces were familiar, there were a number of new ones, suggesting that the initiative reached parts of the membership that the Society has not reached before.

Let us hope that this is the first of many ideas that the Society will adopt in the coming months as it reaches out to persuade the membership that it has something to offer everyone.

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