John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Our strange health care pie has many ingredients. As such, I acknowledge the critical role pharmacists have played in keeping a limping service alive for so long. We are all grateful to them for performing that function. In addition, every doctor will have had occasion to be grateful to a pharmacist for spotting a mistake in a prescription and thereby avoiding something bad happening. Pharmacy provides a tremendous back-stop service.

We need to take a radical new look at the way in which health care is delivered. It is not a question of reform but a much more fundamental change, whether a re-engineering or perhaps even a revolution. I am not sure what is the correct way to describe what we need to do to deliver health care in this century.

It is suggested that the role of the pharmacist be expanded from one where he or she often follows directions provided by a doctor for the safe dispensation and prescribing of medicines to one where he or she makes more independent clinical decisions. Will this require a fundamental change in the way in which we educate pharmacists? Will it require a new generation of pharmacists with a fundamentally different skill set from the existing generation or is it possible, with the existing skill set, to adapt work practices in a safe direction? I am not arguing for one option or another as I honestly do not have the answer.

Pharmacy, like the travel, newspaper and music retail industries, is undergoing a fundamental change, driven partly by technology and partly by modern management practice. In the case of pharmacy, an emphasis is being placed on the cost benefits that accrue from having large multiples as opposed to individual retailers. Is this process inevitable and, if so, how will it affect IPU members? What will be lost if the retail landscape of pharmacy changes in this way?