‘The experiment is over and PSNI has been found not fit for purpose. It’s time that the Department of Health started discussions - as is its intention following a recent public consultation - to secure transfer of pharmacy regulation to the General Pharmaceutical Council’


more than half of their members non- pharmacists. A non-pharmacy President was appointed and the great experiment began.


PsNI’s regulatory role was beefed up, yet mere lip-service was paid to the promotion role with the token setting up of the Forum. This committee was always under resourced and where, over the last ten years, it has done some excellent work, there was an unspoken rule that the Forum would not speak too loudly for the profession, for fear that this might be seen to be in conflict with the Council.


By Terry Maguire I


t’s a hybrid regulator: the only uk professional regulatory body to retain a dual legal responsibility to regulate and promote a profession. Fifteen years ago, pharmacists here, and I am proud to be one of them, managed to convince the Department of Health that PsNI must retain this dual role.


The size of the profession in NI – combined with our complex politics - meant the stormont mandarins hesitated in bringing in the General Pharmaceutical Council set-up to regulate pharmacists and pharmacy technicians in GB. Instead we got the 2011 amendment to the Pharmacy Order 1976.


The Council and the statutory Committee were transformed, with


Modern regulators are only supposed to look after the public interest and stand up for the dignity of and trust in the profession. Modern regulators have little interest in the professionals who do their very best on a day-to- day basis.


With fewer and fewer pharmacists residing in 73 university street, and those there not really kept in the loop, PsNI became deliberately more distant from those who had created it back in 1925 and who still paid the wages of an increasing workforce.


This detachment became most acute in the spring of this year. With the arrival of a viral epidemic, we went into lockdown and both the Department of Health and the Health and social Care Board responded rapidly, implementing changes to legislation designed to make the frantic and difficult work of those of us at the coal-face manageable.


These changes were designed to primarily control the tsunami of work


that washed up at our opened doors and keep the patients who benefit from our work safe.


A myriad of other agencies likewise came together to make it possible for pharmacists to provide our essential role; all, that is, except PsNI. Three areas of PsNI’s responsibilities were immediately a concern to pharmacists: the training of pre- registration students, the pre-reg exam and CPD. There needed to be a reduction in, and flexibility for, these regulatory requirements.


My view was clear. At the very least the pre-reg exam and CPD should be cancelled. Given the circumstances, this move would not materially affect patient safety and, indeed, would probably improve it.


I spoke with a number of contractors, who had to step down pre-reg tutors, for shielding purposes. The students were continuing to get excellent support, but PsNI proved inflexible in accepting this, adding additional requirements that caused severe stress.


The pre-reg exam normally has a 99 per cent pass rate so logically dropping it in an unprecedented year - the last year PsNI would run its own exam - could not have any meaningful or material impact on the ability of our students to become qualified, competent pharmacists.


Despite requests to do so, and citing logistical reasons, however, PsNI would not budge, pushing the exam date to later in the summer.


CPD should have been an easier call for PsNI. Like most of my colleagues, I learnt more from March to June 2020 than in any other three-month period of my career. I was never busier or more stressed, but our calls to cancel CPD in the current year were flatly ignored. We were given three extra months to make submissions, giving us only a nine-month period to complete our 20/21 submissions.


And all this at a time when PsNI has given up running a pre-reg exam, deciding to buy in the exam from the General Pharmaceutical Council!


When, at the zoom-platformed AGM, I asked the President, Jim Livingstone, if he felt PsNI had lost the confidence of the profession because of its stubborn intransience during the spring and summer of 2020, he was adamant it hadn’t and remained convinced that PsNI had done a good job. He claimed he had seen no evidence that community pharmacists were unhappy, so he clearly hadn’t seen the nearly 800 signatures on a petition to stand down CPD.


The experiment is over and PsNI has been found not fit for purpose. It’s time that the Department of Health started discussions - as is its intention following a recent public consultation - to secure transfer of pharmacy regulation to the General Pharmaceutical Council.


This will allow for more efficient regulation of pharmacists here and it will herald the start of pharmacy technician regulation, which is already some 30 years overdue.


PHARMACy IN FOCus - 17


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