Editorial

From the desk of the editor

Welcome to the May 2012 homepage edition of i2P-Information to Pharmacists. Rollo Manning has been having some time out having staples removed from the site of his open heart surgery.He is now at home recuperating in Darwin, having arrived home last Friday, beating a cold and hasty retreat from Canberra.We all wish him a speedy recovery and hopefully, he will be fit enough to contribute by next month.
This month, Pharmedia discusses the toll that is taken when someone complains about you to an authority without good cause. Well, the good news is that you can now take action to protect yourself if such a complaint is made, and that may even include action for defamation. Read about a recent case involving two doctors, with Mark Coleman drawing on personal experience to illustrate.

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About that "Un-Invitation"

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Dr John Dunlop (PGDipPharm, MPharm, DPharm(Auck), FACPP, FNZCP, FPSNZ, MCAPA) articles by this author...

John has been involved in community pharmacy for most of his professional life. Until he sold up, he owned the busiest pharmacy in New Zealand. He started the first "Dispensary Only" pharmacy in New Zealand which for a long time was the biggest dispensary in New Zealand. John moved on to become a professional services provider through Comprehensive Pharmacy Solutions Ltd (CPSL) as a clinical advisory pharmacist. He holds a range of high profile positions within the pharmacy profession.

It was interesting reading John Menadue’s speech given at the Pharmacy Australia Congress in Sydney in October.
It was even more interesting to read of the UN-invitation by the Queensland branch of the College of Pharmacy Practice and Management, the stance taken by the Pharmacy Guild of Australia and the Pharmaceutical Society, to support only pharmacy activities provided from within a community pharmacy.
How draconian is that?
Research has demonstrated, as has the low uptake of new professional services from within a community pharmacy, that the existing community pharmacy model is not compatible with the implementation of these new professional opportunities.
The two major arguments put forward are ‘lack of time’ and ‘lack of funding’.

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The lack of time stems from trying to cope with the unpredictable pressures generated from within successful community pharmacies with either a large retail or dispensing component, or both.

The lack of money is also a red herring. Governments have made available large sums of money to community pharmacy for various levels of medication management for years now. None of the budgeted amounts have ever been spent either in Australia or New Zealand. This is in spite of the ‘dumbing down’ of the medicines management process from the clinically intense Comprehensive Pharmaceutical Care model introduced to New Zealand by Doug Hepler and Linda Strand in the mid 1990s, to the current Medicines Use Review / Adherence Support Service in New Zealand

If the community pharmacy fraternity find it difficult (impossible?) to implement these innovative professional services – and there is a range of possible services – why on earth would PSA and the Guild wish to prevent non pharmacy owners from embarking on new models of practice? Surely this is shooting the profession in the foot?

One can only conclude that community pharmacy has become very greedy indeed. It seems to me that community pharmacy owners are abusing the position of trust the profession has historically afforded them. The Guild and PSA have no right to insist that all professional pharmacy activity should be funded through a community pharmacy, which surely reeks of a cartel. Government funders will also be forced to realise in time, that this sector of pharmacy is only interested in the money generated through volume of product provided, and not interested in expanding the healthcare role of the pharmacist to provide better medicines-related health outcomes for the population.

Fortunately in New Zealand the Guild has not been so obstructive and our Pharmaceutical Society appears to work on behalf of the profession and not one particular sector. A small, but hopefully growing, number of independent pharmacists are currently funded by their Primary Health Organisations to work in primary care, educating doctors and providing comprehensive medication reviews, either as domiciliary visits or by having appointments to see patients in the general practice. Some will have prescribing privileges within the next 18 months.

These pharmacists have up skilled and taken the leap into the world of primary care in a truly collaborative environment. They find the work remunerative and satisfying and it sure beats counting tablets. These are the true leaders of our profession, paving the way for the desperately needed expansion of the profession outside the four walls of a pharmacy. This new model of care for pharmacist delivered clinical services that needs to be embraced and promoted, or we are in grave danger of the nurses being the medicine managers in the general practices, and the pharmacists being relegated to the supply and distribution function, still focusing on volume of product being turned over and fee-for-service reimbursement methods.

Thank God that in this country we are not forced to restrict our thinking and activity to the pecuniary and insular thinking promoted by the Pharmacy Guild and Society in Australia.

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