The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 279 No 7471 p353
29 September 2007

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• Retention fees (12)
• CPD (2)
• The profession (2)
• Drug misuse
• Community pharmacy

Letters to the Editor

Community pharmacy

Increased prescription load — tale of woe

From Mr. C. Morris, MRPharmS

As a locum pharmacist I was rarely bothered by the need to count prescriptions each month but as I have now joined the ranks of the employed pharmacists counting and sorting is now a major part of my month end routine. As such I read with interest the letter by John Nunney (PJ, 15 September, p290) and the response of Fiona Punchard, communications manager at the Prescription Pricing Division.

Poor Ms Punchard spins a terrible tale of woe: of increasing prescription numbers and that they were all processed by the PPD. She makes it sound like some poor man having to go through all the prescriptions himself. I believe that there are hundreds of people working at the PPD. Let me see, hundreds of people working through an ever increasing number of prescriptions. What does that remind me of? Perhaps it is pharmacy.

Pharmacists have to cope with the increased prescription load but, unfortunately, unlike the PPD, we cannot push some of the more tedious work onto someone else down the line in the name of “automation and efficiency”.

Chris Morris
Member of the English Pharmacy Board,
Royal Pharmaceutical Society

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