It never rains but it pours

I hear that the new owners of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s Lambeth site want the Society out before its new building near the Tower of London is ready for occupation. So the Society will need to find temporary lodgings for a couple of months. This, on top of the news that the site sold recently for twice what the Society got for it, will be hard to bear.

None of this would have arisen, though, if the last Labour government had not legislated to take regulation away from the Society in the wake of various scandals involving regulation of health professionals – none involving pharmacists, incidentally. Having lost regulation, the Lambeth building became too big for the Society. And a sale became inevitable once the regulators moved out. Ironically, the much smaller Pharmaceutical Society of Northern Ireland has been left alone to continue as a joint regulatory and representative body.

In all honesty, I can’t see why the RPS could not have been left to go about its traditional business, too. It had its critics – what body doesn’t – but it had done a good job in raising professional standards and the standing of pharmacists. As it is, legislators have greatly weakened the Society for no obvious public benefit. I can’t see that the new pharmacy regulatory body has been able to do anything that the Society could not have done. It’s just another quango to me.

Delivery app goes national

Gary Jones, a Welsh independent, was so alarmed when his delivery driver wanted to take a holiday that he decided he needed to do something to ensure that people got their medicines when they should in the absence of such a key worker. Being something of an ideas man, he set about devising an electronic system that would sort deliveries into a logical order and direct a novice delivery person around the rural area in West Wales where he is based – all this while allowing him to keep track of what was going on.

The result was an app that won Gary the Independent Pharmacy Award for Innovation in 2014 (ICP January p16). And now it gives me great pleasure to record that Gary’s brainchild is available to all independents via the National Pharmacy Association. Now named Pro Delivery Manager, Gary’s system has been refined with the help of the NPA and other pioneer users. A spread in the May/June issue of the NPA’s journal inpharmacy gives full details.

Election reflection

After what seemed like an interminable campaign the election is now over. Thank goodness! I did not care for the NHS being turned into a political football, but I suppose that the way it was used by the nationalists in the Scottish independence referendum, despite the fact that the NHS is devolved, made that inevitable. Perhaps the most sensible suggestion I heard, and I can’t remember who made it, was that we needed to take a long-hard look at the future of the NHS – which faces unlimited demands – on an all-party basis. A Royal Commission or some such would seem to me to be a great idea.

The Labour Party, if it had won, would have repealed Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Act. I reckon that a lot of independents would like to see that happen, regardless of their political affiliations. The Act has given us something of a dog’s dinner, with medically dominated CCGs, ignorant local authority health and wellbeing boards and NHS area teams increasingly poking their fingers in.

I never liked the idea of CCGs. Something I heard the other day about an anticoagulation service reinforces that view. The service is currently being operated successfully by pharmacists under a patient group direction. The CCG now says that pharmacists must be independent prescribers if they are to prescribe anticoagulants. There will not be time to arrange this before the deadline in October, so the service will revert to one where the medics prescribe. They want the business back and their colleagues on the CCG will see that they get it.