Many years ago, just after I qualified, I was working in a new 100 hour pharmacy in a very well known supermarket chain.
To be honest, the working conditions were pretty terrible in that store. I had brilliant staff, but not enough of them. At the time, the policy of the supermarket for 100 hour pharmacies was to have no support staff there for the first hour and a half of the day, and the last two hours of the day. I argued tooth an nail against this, as we all know that pharmacists should ideally not self-check a prescription, no matter how quiet the pharmacy was between those times. The attitude of the company was that I was in the minority, and that I was complaining unnecessarily.
At this time I was the only permanent pharmacist working there: the rest of the time we were running on locums. The company policy was to ideally use their locum booking system, but this was notoriously unreliable. I found myself setting my alarm for 6 am every morning, getting up and getting ready to wait for a phone call to tell me I would have to go in because the locum hadn't turned up, even on my days off. I found myself doing 16 hour shifts, occasionally one after the other, and with 3.5 hours of that spent on my own.
Even without the horrendous attitudes from other managers in-store (the daily battles, the snide comments about how much I was getting paid, the total lack of understanding about pharmacy law, and the outright sexism), these conditions were brewing for a dispensing error.
The day it happened, I was working a 14 hour shift the day after working after a 16 hour shift. I was having to check a prescription whilst also being on the phone, because of the lack of staff. I checked that the drug, strength, directions etc were correct, but I didn't spot that the wrong name was on the label.
The patient rang up to check that the cream was the right one for them. We apologised profusely, offered to redispense, offered to go through our complaints procedure etc. the patient was happy with the reassurance that it was the right cream and refused the other measures, stating that she was quite happy that the situation was rectified.
Next thing I know, I'm being investigated by the then-regulator, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. You can't even imagine what this did to me. I was an absolute mess, convinced that I was going to lose the career I had worked so hard for. I co-operated entirely with the investigation, just as I had with the patient. I informed the inspector of the working conditions and my fears that it would lead to something more serious. None of this was taken into account in the final report, which gave me a warning, and the fright of my life.
All this for a minor dispensing error, which caused no harm to anyone.
You'd think, then, that the current regulator, the General Pharmaceutical Council, would come down hard on any pharmacist who actually endangered patients willingly. You'd think they would take decisive action, particularly where a pharmacist has had similar previous warnings which they have chosen to ignore. You'd think this would especially be the case where the pharmacist in question had been caught out by a BBC journalist posing as a concerned mother wondering about whether her child should be protected against whooping cough, a disease which can - and does- kill people.
See where I'm going with this? I'm hearing reports that the GPhC are suggesting that the Ainsworth's pharmacy case is nothing to do with them, and that as homeopathy is regulated by the MHRA it isnt their area. If that's the case, why is Mr Pinkus and the premises even registered with them?
I'm really hoping that this isn't the case, and that the GPhC are actually going to take decisive action. After all, what sort of a message does it give out to the public if they aren't being protected from harm? What sort of a message does it give out to the pharmacists that do their bet every day, trying their hardest to be as accurate as possible in working conditions that are ill-designed for such a purpose?
Come on GPhC, be fair to the majority of your pharmacists who work according to your standards and actually do put patients first, and who do ensure that their recommendations are evidence-based and made with the best interests of the patient at heart. .
Hxxx
P.S. bacon. (Ignore this unless you are @aptaim)
