The following is an extract from the website of Chemist & Druggist magazine, dotpharmacy.com of today, 13 May 2004.

 

Hannawin quits NPA board

Former NPA chairman Terry Hannawin has resigned from the NPA’s board of management after its decision to open membership to pharmacies owned by doctors.

Mr Hannawin, who is also chief executive of the Pharmaceutical Contractors Committee in Northern Ireland, resigned after an NPA board meeting in March.

He said: “I was both angered and saddened by this disastrous decision. Apart from the fact that the Association was never intended to represent the interests of dispensing doctors, the timing of this decision could scarcely have been worse, given the uncertainty around the control of entry regulations in England and the role PCTs may be expected to play in future. I need hardly remind you that PCTs are currently dominated by GPs.”

He added: “I do not consider myself, or my pharmacy, to be the same as so-called ‘doctor controlled pharmacies’ and the board of the NPA should not in my view have conferred respectability and legitimacy on these bodies by offering NPA membership.

 

Last week the same web-site announced that his Association had withdrawn its objections to doctor-owned pharmacies.  At last, it appeared, the National Pharmaceutical Association had seen the light and was growing up.    

The Association had come to realise that their objection had only one basis, it was anti-doctor.  In short, it displayed the worst form of bigotry but the NPA is in good company.   Neither it nor the eminent Royal Pharmaceutical Society has been anything other than anti-doctor for decades.

Both organisations refused to allow pharmacists to help the original Dispensing Doctors Association develop an educational  dispensing course for the dispensing technicians who worked in doctors' dispensaries.    Indeed, I have on file a letter from the Society of Apothecaries which explains the pressure put upon that Society by one of those bodies if it dared give its support to a qualifying examination for such dispensers.   This, despite the undoubted fact that such courses and examinations would protect patients.

It is only recently that the Pharmaceutical Society came to terms with the concept of pharmacists who were employed by groups of doctors to advise on their prescribing.

The only odd thing about last week's NPA announcement was that the lifting of their objection was simply because it could be seen to be anti-doctor.   In itself that is a laudable reason but a better reason would be because the ownership of a pharmacy has no bearing on the way it is run.

According to the Pharmaceutical Society's Code of Ethics, which all chemists must observe, the superintendent pharmacist in a pharmacy is totally and utterly responsible for everything to do with the ordering, dispensing, keeping and safety of medicines in his pharmacy.   In effect, therefore, there can be no difference between a business owned pharmacy - such as Lloyds - and a doctor owned pharmacy.  Nor, for that matter, one owned by a group of traffic wardens.

Unless, that is, the NPA and its past-chairman Mr Hannawin are suggesting that all pharmacists who run or will run medically owned pharmacies are grossly inferior, careless and negligent members of the pharmacy profession.   If that is the case, then there are a goodly number of pharmacists out there who will resent that imputation.

Mr Hannawin does not consider his pharmacy to be the same as a doctor owner pharmacy.  It may not be.  It could, indeed, be inferior.  Maybe it is.   That rather depends on the standards of the pharmacist in control because like medically owned pharmacies it will be under the control of a pharmacist.

Rather quaintly Mr Hannawin intones that the NPA was never meant to represent the interests of dispensing doctors.   He need not fear, most dispensing doctors will continue to dispense and many of the new one-stop health care pharmacies will be run by companies of non-dispensing, urban doctors eager to improve the service they provide to their patients.   That is why, of course, all pharmacists have pharmacies, isn't it?

However, if Mt Hannawin's feelings carry the day, then the NPA should feel secure in the sure and certain knowledge that it will be facing financial losses in the discrimination and human rights courts when a doctor-owned pharmacy tests the law.   Maybe the NPA has already anticipated this.

As a final comment, the DDA Ltd was never meant to represent the interests of pharmacists but it hasn't done a bad job on that front over the past six or seven years.    After all, what other representative group would campaign with and work with the opposition against the interests of its colleagues?

My final message is to all GPs - dispensing or other - it really doesn't matter a damn what the NPA or Mr Hannawin think, it's time to start seriously thinking about owning your own pharmacy.  For full details on how to do it, please contact me on Davidroberts@doctors.org.uk - NOW.   See also my book Your own Pharmacy, published by Radcliffe Medical.

(14/5/04)