The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 280 No 7493 p307
15 March 2008

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• 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

Minor ailment scheme

Pharmacists are under pressure

From Dr D. M. McNaughton, MRPharmS

How refreshing to read the letter from Nadim Ali regarding the Minor Ailment Scheme (MAS) in Scotland (PJ, 8 March 2008, p273). Prescribing advisers for years have tried to persuade GPs not to prescribe the very items appearing in the MAS formulary.

Pharmacists may see the MAS scheme as a way of supporting GP colleagues in line with the advice from our political and civil servant masters but, surely, the stressful explanation of why we are not prescribing from a patients’ shopping list of medicines shows pharmacists in a bad light.

Pharmacy staff can often feel pressured by customers (patients) to ask the pharmacist to prescribe when the presentation is not a minor ailment.

David M. McNaughton
Edinburgh

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