The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 280 No 7490 p212
23 February 2008

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• Emeritus status
• Community pharmacy
• EHC (3)
• Dispensing
• The profession (2)
• Manufacturing
• Supply

Letters to the Editor

Emeritus status

Developing proposals for an alumni offering

From Mr H. Patel, FRPharmS

My personal vision for the future professional body for pharmacy is of an organisation that will serve its members from cradle to grave. For me, that would mean welcoming students as associate members from day one of their pharmacy studies and, in particular, it would also mean forging a special relationship with those who have retired from the Register. I think this will be essential if we are to promote a sense of history, status and collegiality within the profession.

In the spirit of this, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s Council has been working for some time now to establish emeritus awards for its retired fellows and long-standing members.

However, responding to concerns raised by the membership, the Council agreed at its February meeting to postpone the creation of these awards until the Society is free from its current regulatory restrictions [see p226].

The restrictions prevent the Council from awarding supportive and meaningful emeritus status. Regrettably, the decision will mean a delay as the emeritus award proposals are passed to the professional body task force, which will be charged with developing the alumni offering as part of the future professional body. I am writing to explain the decision, and what happens next, in more detail.

Readers of the PJ letters pages will be aware that senior and highly respected members of the profession have written to point out the lack of tangible benefit associated with the proposed awards (Bruce Rhodes, 17 November 2007, p565, and 1 December 2007, p623; Bill Brookes, 24 November 2007, p588), and correspondence has also been received by the office along the same lines.

For example, recipients would not be members of the Society (creating a new membership category would require a special resolution under the Charter and Privy Council approval), would not be on the Society’s registers (and so would not be able to call themselves pharmacists) and would not be eligible to use a postnominal denoting the award.

One respondent summed this up as follows: “So what is the value of this award in terms of membership? The answer would appear to be ‘not a lot’.” This comment hit home. I found it hard to disagree, but there seemed little that the Council could do right now to make it better.

The Society cannot, while it remains a regulator, offer a form of membership that does not carry the regulatory burden associated with being a health professional, given that “pharmacist” and “member/fellow of the RPSGB” are titles reserved by law to those who are on the Society’s Register of Pharmacists.

However, things are changing. The Council took the policy decisions on emeritus awards in August 2006, before there was any suggestion that the Society would change its position as a regulator as well as a professional body.

We are now in a different place and, if Government timetables hold firm, regulation will be decoupled from the Society by early 2010 and we hope that a new professional body will evolve.

This new body will have the freedom it needs to make these awards meaningful and worthwhile. For example, it could create a new category of membership — perhaps emeritus, or alumnus membership — and there would be no need to restrict the use of postnominals.

The Society has already told the Clarke Inquiry that it believes there is a strong case for expanding the membership of the future professional body to include pharmacists who have retired from the Register.

Bill Brookes has written recently (PJ, 9 February 2008, p149) to say that he hopes a place will be found for retired pharmacists in the new professional body and a means by which they could still be involved. I wholeheartedly agree.

The Council considered all these points last week and decided that it should be guided by the comments it had received. The issue of emeritus membership is one that Council is taking extremely seriously but the regulatory role ties our hands.

The Council wants to introduce something of genuine value to members and it is clear that current proposals are wide of the mark in delivering a meaningful and worthwhile award. It has therefore agreed to postpone creation of the emeritus awards until such time as the Society is free from its current regulatory restrictions.

In the meantime, the professional body task force will be asked to develop proposals for an alumni offering as an integral part of the wider work towards a new professional body, in the light of the findings of the Clarke Inquiry.

Membership input to these proposals will be vital and I would urge members to e-mail any comments or suggestions to positivefeedback@rpsgb.org

To me this seems the only sensible solution, given the restrictions we currently face. I hope members will agree with me and I would particularly like to thank those members who wrote in and made us think again.

Hemant Patel
President
Royal Pharmaceutical Society

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