A bad idea

The idea of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society becoming a royal college is again being mooted by its president Ash Soni (PJ, Feb 7, p156). This was something put forward by the last government in its White Paper on regulation for the pharmacy profession – the document that started the process of taking regulation away from the RPS. I’m not sure this is the way to go. Apart from the Royal College of Nursing, which is a trade union, the other royal colleges in the health field are bodies for specialists – the royal colleges of physicians and surgeons, for instance. The RPS is not such a body – it is an institution for the generality of pharmacists. If you register as a pharmacist you can join the RPS. The bit of the RPS that has royal college connotations is its Faculty, which is a means of recording professional progress, suitably rewarded with appropriate post-nominals. The RPS should concentrate on reaching out to the general body of pharmacists. Anything that makes it appear to be an elitist body should be resisted.

An independent obituary

The obituary columns in national newspapers are reserved for extraordinary people – those who have made a contribution of much greater worth than the rest of us. So it was entirely fitting to see the lion’s share of the Independent’s obituary page of February 16 given over to a tribute to Robert Blyth, the former editor of the Pharmaceutical Journal, who died towards the end of last year. Blyth was editor of the PJ for 25 years from 1961 to 1986. Editing the PJ was (and is) no sinecure. To succeed in the role, the post-holder has to have a good understanding of the profession, supreme editorial skills, work extraordinarily hard, and be thick skinned – the latter characteristic being needed to deal with the criticism that is an inevitable part of the job. Blyth matched these requirements and then some.

Blyth had no doubts about what the PJ’s role should be: it should act as a medium for informing its prime target audience, members of the Society, about pharmacy and its practice, the context within which the profession operates and the medicines that are central to its work. Importantly, it should act as a link between the Society and its members, and provide a forum in which they could express their views.

In Blyth’s day, there was no uncertainty about who the editor really was. Would that we could say the same now. For reasons never properly explained, the PJ of today has no editor as such but a publisher who acts as a kind of editor-in-chief. He sets the broad editorial strategy, determining the kind of thing that should be published, while decisions about what actually gets in are made on a collegiate basis by senior editorial staff.

The publisher is not a pharmacist and his sector knowledge is less than that of those senior staff members who are pharmacists. He seems determined to take the publication down a route where science is played up on an international basis (complete with impenetrable infographics) and the day-to-day affairs of the profession are played down. The situation needs sorting out. The Journal should have a proper editor again – one with sound sector knowledge who really calls the tune.

The Independent’s obituary was written by Ted Boden, who was an assistant editor of the PJ under Blyth. Boden went on to become editor of the Veterinary Record. His great success in that role was due in no small measure to what he had learnt from his former chief.

Oh well!

The former Co-operative Pharmacy branches are to be rebranded by new owner Bestway as ‘Well Pharmacies’ – an enigmatic moniker, it seems to me. The word ‘well’ could signify a bottomless pit, be a synonym for ‘so what’ or a reference to a state of health. I suppose it is the latter that Bestway has in mind. Perhaps independents should be thankful that the owners have not alluded to their own company name by calling the establishments ‘Best Pharmacies’. That really would have put the cat among the pigeons.