Reject the royal college proposals to keep a Society for the benefit of pharmacists

Twice Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) president Nicholas Wood opines in a recent letter that representing the interests of pharmacists is now done by others in pharmacy, and as such our Society, which was saved during his tenure two decades ago from becoming an organisation purely for the public benefit, should now, in his view, instead become a royal college primarily serving the public.

Contrariwise, there now exists already a pharmacy body in the form of the General Pharmaceutical Council, which was created when government forced the split away of regulatory functions from the RPSGB in 2010, with the specific intention that it would serve the public. This left the Society to dedicate itself as the one sole body representing the professional interests of all pharmacists in Great Britain, as it is bound to do under its current Royal Charter — which the special resolution vote (SRV) seeks to abrogate.

The draft charter being foisted upon us for our vote proposes changes which go radically further even than the one repelled at great effort in 2004: not only to re-write large swathes of its content — as can be seen manifest in the tracked changes version of the proposed charter — deleting all mention of pharmacists except in regard to existing full membership and to charitable relief, but also to change the fundamental nature of the body into one bound strictly by the requirements of charities legislation and regulation for charitable purposes only for the public benefit. As such, the Royal College of Pharmacy would not represent the interests of pharmacists.

Unlike previous SRVs — most recently in 2011 to admit “pharmaceutical scientists”, during which the Society website hosted a 70-page forum debating it — this draft charter, comprising the tangible proposal for scrutiny, was published only four weeks before this precipitate ballot opens. Since that time, the only opportunity for member engagement has been just two one-hour webinars.

In the webinars, concerns were dismissed with platitudes in the scant time available. Attendees asked for publication of the Firetail report, based on the content of which we are told Assembly made its decision to hold this SRV — it seems this is not to see the light of day.

Also asserted baselessly has been that the public benefit should align with the interests of pharmacists. But what will be the “public benefit” in practice? It might be interpreted to mean embracing the self-selection of P-medicines under its new jargon of “facilitated self-selection” and “safe supply”, under the guise of customer (not patient) choice and self-care — which would be neither in the interests of pharmacists attempting with heightened difficulties to supervise and often to refuse unsafe sales, nor of the health of patients and the public determined to purchase particular medicines.

It might mean removing the safety-critical pharmacist clinical check and even presence in the pharmacy, under the guise of savings for the public purse or of freeing up pharmacists to perform sundry services, which may not require the unique skills of pharmacists and might then be delivered by other healthcare professionals or even support staff. It might mean pharmacies expanding services ever further, and perhaps even employing prescribing pharmacists cheaply to save GP costs, for the perceived benefit of the public increasingly unable to get a GP appointment, but heightening the immense workload pressures which have long been inflicted upon pharmacists facing patients at the front line, which imperil patient care and safety. And it might mean pharmacist education tailored to suit those ends.

The “public benefit” may very well transpire to mean just what the Board of Trustees chooses it to mean — neither more nor less.

David Tyas, MPharm (Hons), MTPharmC, MRPharmS