| • Category M medicines
• Community pharmacy (3)
• Primary care contracts
• 100-hour pharmacies
• PCT commissioning
• Prescription charges
• Medicines use reviews
• Dispensing
• Minor ailment scheme
• Adverse drug reactions
• Asthma management (2)
• Non-practising status
• The Society
Letters to the Editor
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Dispensing
Take back work from specialist laboratories
Mr L. J. Cope MRPharmS
The question of extemporaneous dispensing is not difficult to address.
In the early 1990s I worked in a pharmacy where the local GP held a clinic
in dermatology at the local hospital. In a single morning we would be called
upon to dispense up to six extemporaneous ointments, creams and lotions.
Most of these were compounded on a “slab” which had, in a previous
existence, been the side window of a Mini. We made menthol and camphor in
white soft paraffin and numerous bottles of sodium bicarbonate ear drops.
Early this century I was still making batches of L-thyroxine 10mg powders for
an infant and, until I had to stop working, due to a stroke, I regularly made
menthol in aqueous cream.
If the profession took a step back from the desire to be “second tier” doctors,
spent more time at the bench, rather than carrying out medicines use reviews
while the patients were waiting to have their prescriptions checked, the standing
of pharmacy would be enhanced, and the recently qualified computer-literate “whizz-kids” could
really practise their art.
I realise that some work will need to be handled by specialist laboratories,
but most work carried out by them can safely and efficiently be done in a dispensary,
by a competent pharmacist or dispenser. This would benefit the patient, and,
in the long run, the cash-strapped NHS.
Leslie Cope
Walsall, West Midlands
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The
Pharmaceutical Journal