Chairmans Letter - Primary Care Edition

Although the introduction of the Responsible Pharmacist (RP) provisions was primarily aimed at the community sector, some of them will have an impact on pharmacists working in primary care and hospital. Additionally, there are many pharmacists who these days work in more than one branch of the profession who may well see different impacts depending on where they happen to be working.

The PDA has sought legal counsel and as the feature on page 11 shows, these changes represent a very signifcant uplift in the levels of personal responsibility and risk for anyone who signs up to being a Responsible Pharmacist.

The RP provisions will now make an individual pharmacist personally and legally responsible not only for the supply of medicines to the public, BUT ALSO for ensuring the safe and effective running of the pharmacy – in so far as it relates to medicines.

The PDA has many concerns about the proposals and unless some changes can yet be made, then they will represent a very unwelcome development.

After some signifcant lobbying, the PDA has been belatedly invited to join the Society, employer representatives, the government, academics and others to draft the regulations in a series of meetings held at the end of 2008. The idea is that these regulations will ‘go live’ and will govern pharmacists from the autumn of 2009.

Despite the fact that you cant make a silk purse out of a sows ear we will nevertheless be doing our level best to argue against the worst of the proposals in the interests of both pharmacists and patients.

For information more detailed than the feature on page 11, members are invited to click here and read the formal PDA response to the DoH consultation on the Responsible pharmacist.

Pharmacist Prescribing

With the roles of pharmacists now developing at an astonishing rate, the PDA is increasingly supporting members who are practising in new and previously uncharted professional territory.

In recent months we have been contacted by members who have become pharmacist prescribers seeking advice on a range of matters associated with this new area of practice. It is apparent to us that the PDA should support the development of this important new discipline by providing pharmacists with a risk management event which provides them with information to benefit their prescribing practice. Proactive risk management and helping pharmacists avoid problems in the future, after all, is the very essence of what the PDA is all about. Our idea for such an event has been further supported by prescribing pharmacist members who have actually requested that such an event be organised.

In dealing with pharmacist prescribing, we will be analysing issues and problems encountered by other, more established prescribing professions; the painful lessons learned elsewhere will inevitably be beneficial to pharmacists.

We have developed a detailed pharmacist prescribing session which will be available as an option to interested pharmacists at the forthcoming PDA Annual conference on March 1st in Birmingham.

This will be an opportunity for those involved or thinking of being involved in pharmacist prescribing to not only learn something useful, but also to network with colleagues involved in this new and cutting edge form of pharmacy practice.More information appears on page 3, or can be found on the-pda.org where you can also register on-line.

I look forward to seeing you there!