Leadership and innovation will bring benefits to all pharmacists
In this article, the President of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, Hemant
Patel, explains why the development of a new professional body for pharmacy will provide benefits for pharmacists in all sectors and is a wonderful opportunity for the profession
 As President of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society I believe that the
major challenge for the Council in the new century is how to release
the brainpower
of our profession to help the communities we serve.
Pharmacists are taking personal and professional responsibility for
the clinical care of patients, and the health and well-being of the
public,
more than at any time in the past. This responsibility is born out
of changes in pharmacy practice, in the regulation and professional
leadership
of pharmacy, in Government priorities and in the way pharmacists are
remunerated.
Most significant of all are the changes we are witnessing in technology
and in ideology. Pharmacists in every sector of the profession will
regularly need new skills with shorter and shorter half-lives to address
these
changes. The key NHS priorities include:
• Management of long term conditions
• Better access
• Greater choice
• Improved patient experience
• Personalisation of care for service users
Shortening the patient journey is a key ambition across all these areas.
Transfer of care to primary care provides pharmacists in primary, secondary
and community care with opportunities and tough challenges that will
need to be resolved locally, with help from a national level. The need
to respond by providing leadership to promote and facilitate local innovation
has never been greater.
These changes mark an end to the known road. We are now entering terra
incognita — the uncharted landscape of tomorrow. We will see a
world of greater uncertainty. A world of accelerating change. A world
where economics will be based not on land, money or raw materials but
on intellectual capital.
Thomas A. Stewart, editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review, defines
intellectual capital as “intellectual material — knowledge,
information, intellectual property, experience — that can be put
to use to create wealth”. He argues that knowledge has become the
pre-eminent economic resource. If that is so, it makes sense that managing
it becomes the most important economic task of individuals, businesses
and professions.
The question of how we as a profession develop pharmacy’s social
architecture so that it generates intellectual capital has been on my
mind for some time. Pharmacists are individualists and bright people.
We need to work together and deploy our creativity.
We need organised
anarchy to burst the current mindset that controls, orders and predicts.
To generate intellectual capital, pharmacy will have to foster creative
collaboration between pharmacists and other health professionals in different
areas of work, and translate intention into action.
This cannot be done from a distance. It has to be done locally. The Society
needs to help pharmacists develop the ability to understand what new
approaches are required, plus the behavioural flexibility to be able
to change their everyday practice. For this to work successfully, we
have to make the benefits of such change for the individual pharmacist
overt.
An important role of the new look, new shape professional leadership
body will, therefore, be in offering tangible value to pharmacists in
undergoing change, realising their professional aspirations and deriving
comprehensive job satisfaction.
The professional leadership body’s boundaries of organisation will
have to be porous to get information from the people at the periphery — those
who are usually the most creative but often the least consulted — to
the centre and out again to others. We will need networks, joint working
with others outside the Society’s structures, and strategic partnerships
that cut across the professional (and possibly national) boundaries.
Preliminary
discussion has already started in these areas, but please be patient
with us if you have not yet been involved. And please engage
with the independent inquiry we have commissioned on the principles,
functions and structure of the new professional body (www.theclarkeinquiry.com).
With increasing feminisation of the profession we have to ensure there
is full deployment of the talents of women in our profession. In the
changing world where social care and health care will merge we will
require more of the feminine character traits that are the opposite
of tough
talking, no-nonsense male stereotypes.
At the Society we have a strong sense of purpose. A sense of vision:
making Britain the safest place in the world to take medicines. This
is different from the past where we have concentrated on making policies,
practices and procedures. This is evidenced, for example, by changes
in the code of ethics
from being prescriptive and restrictive to a principle-based guide.
We
are working on the link between this vision and genuine benefits for
pharmacists in all sectors, as well as for the wider communities
which we serve.
It is a wonderful opportunity for us all. Watch this space! |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal