The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 280 No 7506 p732
14 June 2008

Society summary

These reports are of debates at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s branch representatives’ meeting on 22 May 2008.
Further reports

Overseas pharmacists should have to prove their competence in the English language, BRM decides

Overseas pharmacists working in Britain should have to prove their competence in the English language, the branch representatives’ meeting decided.

Steven Curtis (Harrow and Hillingdon) proposed that, before being allowed to practise pharmacy in the UK, all “non-UK-registered pharmacists” should be required to prove their ability to speak, read, write and understand spoken English by sitting a test such as that of the International English Language Testing System or the Test of English as a Foreign Language internet-base test (iBT).

Mr Curtis said that some pharmacists were allowed to practise without being able to communicate in English because the Royal Pharmaceutical Society was not allowed to test the language skills of pharmacists who qualified in the 25 non-English speaking countries within the European Economic Area.

In Ireland, the Pharmacy Act 2007 allowed the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland to test registrants’ linguistic competence before they could practise in any way that entailed dealing directly with the public. In Britain, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society could have followed its Irish equivalent’s lead but had chosen not to.

In February 2007, the UK Government White Paper “Trust, assurance and safety: the regulation of health professionals in the 21st century” included arrangements for language testing within the context of the European law. The Department of Health went as far as to carry out a costing exercise, calculating that it would cost just £50,000 in total to the various regulators, and just £1m to the NHS to ensure that all healthcare professionals reached an appropriate standard of English.

Was £1,050,000 too high a price compared to the risk to patient safety and its related potential costs when things went wrong?

The Society put the onus on employers to check pharmacists’ communication skills. The Code of Ethics made it clear that all pharmacists must have sufficient language skills to do the job required of them. The problem was that it was not working.

European law allowed the UK government flexibility to take into account special circumstances. There was no reason why it could not produce a derogation for English language testing for pharmacists, if it felt this was an issue the Society needed assistance with. In fact, there were so many options that it was hard to imagine that none were being used.

Seconding the motion, Shilpa Gohil (Harrow and Hillingdon) said that she was aware of numerous European pharmacists who could not communicate clearly and adequately in English.

It was time for the Society to review the situation and take action. It should urgently choose a mechanism to carry this out before lives were lost or further distrust was caused.

Ian Bell (Leicestershire and Rutland) said that the motion did not go far enough. The need to ensure that pharmacists could communicate with patients or customers meant not just Queen’s English, but also the local English dialect and the languages spoken by people who have immigrated into the locality.

David Thomas (Thames Valley) said that the motion was important because its aim was to protect the public. The public needed to know that the pharmacist in the dispensary could speak, read and write English. He had seen the Irish legislation, and the Irish could so it, so could the British.