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.

read more
open full screen

Columns

Recent Comments

Click here to read...

Past Editions

Volume 1 Number 1
Volume 1 Number 2
Volume 1 Number 3
Volume 1 Number 4
Volume 1 Number 5
Volume 1 Number 6
Volume 1 Number 7
Volume 2 Number 1
Volume 2 Number 2
Volume 2 Number 3
Volume 2 Number 4
Volume 2 Number 5
Volume 2 Number 6
Volume 2 Number 7
Volume 2 Number 8
Volume 2 Number 9
Volume 2 Number 10
Volume 2 Number 11
Volume 3 Number 1
Volume 3 Number 2
Volume 3 Number 3
Volume 3 Number 4
Volume 3 Number 5
Volume 3 Number 6
Volume 3 Number 7
Volume 3 Number 8
Volume 3 Number 9
Volume 3 Number 10
Volume 3 Number 11
Volume 4 Number 1
Volume 4 Number 2
Volume 4 Number 3
Volume 4 Number 4

i2P Archives

EPublications

Click here for a list of epublications

The Farmerscy Guild and the straw man argument

• Printer-friendly version
• Send to friend
• PDF version
• Share

	Geoff March PhD B.Pharm articles by this author...
Geoff is a lecturer in pharmacy practice with the School of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences at the University of South Australia. He has authored or co-authored a range of papers (a full list appears on his personal site here). He is currently national president for the pharmacist association APESMA.

Straw Man “An argument deliberately put up so that it can be knocked down, usually as a distraction from other arguments which cannot be so easily countered,”  - The Macquarie Dictionary.

open this article full screen

From the owners' guild’s bunker, we have seen the usual response to any potential threat - whether real or imaginary - to the Guild’s representation as “the national peak body representing community pharmacy”. It must have been unimaginable to them that the majority of pharmacy organisations would actually get together and call for a new future for the pharmacy profession and for patients. The owners’ guild has reacted as it always has – bully the organisation calling for change.  In this case it has been the Pharmacy Coalition for Health Reform that has been subjected to the Guild's ire.

Readers should understand that the Guild was actually invited to join the Pharmacy Coalition but they flatly refused.

And what was so radical that the Guild just could not swallow its pride and arrogance to join? 

I would have thought that our aims could have been embraced by the whole profession. The Pharmacy Coalition's are listed on page ten of our statement for everyone to see: http://pharmacistsforhealth.com.au/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/PharmacistsforHealth_PolicyStatement.pdf

So the other pharmacy groups came together because our members were telling us that they wanted the opportunity to practise their knowledge and skills, to spend more time with patients both as individual practitioners and in teams to help people take their medicines safely and effectively, no matter where they worked. After all, we know that pharmacists are the only health professionals whose education is focussed on the complexities of medication use. We need to position the profession for the reforms that are already starting to be implemented. We need to integrate our services with the other professions and we need to be seen as fully fledged members of the health team.

We know there is a high level of dissatisfaction with current “practice” because we have surveyed members. 

Further, we felt we needed a broad based view of pharmacy, not one that is exclusively focussed on protecting the interests of pharmacy owners. A profession wide response to the future needs of the community and the Government policy imperatives is a must.  Nurses and general practitioners have gone through a process of re-professionalisation that took around ten years. Pharmacy needs to start this process as a matter of urgency. 

APESMA joined the PCHR because it has a positive vision for the future. The National Health and Hospital reform agenda makes a convincing case that the current status quo of health delivery in Australia is simply not sustainable into the future.

What was really scary for pharmacy as a profession was that pharmacy was barely mentioned in the stakeholder consultation publications that has lead to this policy.  The box for pharmacy was already ticked with the CPA mechanism as it is seen primarily as a medicines supplier and is viewed as having no real role on primary health care teams or in direct patient care. 

From APESMA’s point of view, it has been worrying to see the continued dependence on one principal income stream – that of dispensing.  We are deeply concerned that community pharmacy remains profitable so that employers have the necessary profitability to employ staff at fair rates of pay. We are also worried by the drift into the discounting model where the business model relies on high turnover as the margins are small. We are concerned about the pressures being placed on pharmacists to minimise their professional obligations and maximise their time dispensing prescriptions.

There has been much angst about the call for a Senate inquiry from the Pharmacy Guild, who apparently see any inquiry as a threat to their location rules and monopoly ownership.  We have seen criticism from others (Symbion, the “apolitical” ACP) as something that is not needed now as changes to 5CPA will be too disruptive in light of the economic outlook. Of course recent location rule changes done behind closed doors aren’t counted in the users of this argument. However, this inquiry isn’t about changing 5CPA – that’s simply a furphy. Its the classic straw man argument technique.

Our support for an inquiry into pharmacy is about health reform. 

And there is no such thing as a bad time to reform our health system and make it better for patients and pharmacists.

It has been said that discussions about pharmacy should be kept in house and apparently the Australian Pharmacy Liaison Forum is the best place for this and is almost certainly an attempt to keep the truth about pharmacy under wraps. Well, the only difference in its membership is that the Guild with its 5000 members is represented in this forum, yet refuses to belong to the PCHR where pretty well every other registered pharmacist is represented. The profession should be robust enough to accept scrutiny, to listen to learned others outside the profession as well as have the opportunity for members of the profession to have their input. 

For others there is a fear that an inquiry will not be controllable - it could go anywhere. There is little doubt that the whole profession will defend the defensible, but we should also accept that there may be areas where we need to change.  Yes, we can’t control where the inquiry goes, but that has been our problem all along – too much control.

We can be defensive and introspective, and exclude other key stakeholders from these discussions, or we can act as a mature profession, accept change and defend the defensible, and get on the road to re-professionalisation.  An inquiry is only a step.  Whatever the outcome, we will have learnt something, and then it will be up to all of us to build on that knowledge remembering we are here ultimately to act in people’s best interest.

Clinical Newsfeed

Click here to read more...

Research Reports

Practice Development

Information Technology

Preventive Medicine

i2P Alliance Partners