New professional body should be built from Society
Society’s Lambeth headquarters should be sold to finance new
body |
Pharmacy’s new professional body should be built on what is left of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society after its regulatory functions have been taken over by the planned General Pharmaceutical Council, the Pharmacists’ Defence Association has said.
But in order to achieve a clear dissociation from the past and underpin
the new professional body’s finances, the PDA believes that both
the new body and the regulator need to move out of the Society’s
Lambeth headquarters, which should then be sold to finance the new organisation.
In its written submission to the Clarke Inquiry (PDF 460K), the
PDA adds that the new leadership body should have a smaller council and
a
smaller staff.
Moving out of London would mean that costs would be lower.
“Above all, it must learn how to become member-focused. This is
a very substantial change on the current position,” the PDA says.
It adds: “The new professional body must become a vital component
of a pharmacist’s professional existence by supporting competencies,
providing practice materials, facilitating support networks, supporting
its weakest members, providing professional leadership and promoting
pharmacy to the wider world.”
It is also the PDA’s view that it should be the professional body,
and not the regulator, that proposes and sets standards for the profession
after appropriate consultation with its members and pharmacy employers.
The regulator should then accept and police those standards.
As well as having a directly elected council, the PDA says that the professional
body should have a “senior group” of separately elected pharmacists
to acts as custodians and auditors of the new professional body and as
trustees of its benevolent activities.
So far as membership goes, the PDA believes that the new body should
provide a home for both generalist and specialist pharmacists — but
without any requirement for them to be registered with the regulator — and
for graduate pharmaceutical scientists. But it warns that accepting pharmacy
technicians as full members, particularly if they are not university
graduates, could undermine the whole structure.
“It is possible to see how, under such circumstances, pharmacists
could actually lose what limited interest there was with the new professional
body and, by leaving it, inadvertently create what could be a body primarily
for pharmacy technicians,” it warns.
It further warns that any conflict between the interests of pharmacists
and technicians as the Government seeks to give technicians more responsibility
might cause the professional body to mute its defence of the role of
pharmacists. This could render the new body useless in the eyes of pharmacists
and lead to the creation of a rival organisation.
|
The
Pharmaceutical Journal
Acrobat
Reader