Pharmacy service

With reference to the letter "Liberalisation of Pharmacies" and the commentary, " Pharmacy graduates' dilemma" by Ibn Campusino (The Sunday Times, December 21, pages 16 and 109, respectively), the Malta Chamber of Pharmacists would like to clarify once and for all, for the sake of your readers, the bewilderment being generated by your correspondents.

Pharmacies are, by their nature, and also according to our European culture, an overlap of professional and business activity; where the professional aspect must always be at the centre of the pharmacist's focus.

This does and should not, however, be understood to mean the undermining of the viability of the pharmacy, so as not to compromise the availability of optimal services to the community and opportunities of work for pharmacists and other ancillary human resources.

It is an accepted principle in all civilised countries and, in particular, in the European Union and the European Economic Area that pharmacies are not ordinary business concerns and medicines are not ordinary items of commerce, and this being so, they are regulated in all their aspects.

Indeed, in November 2001, the European Parliament Resolution on the Communication of Services of General Interest stated that the EP supports the Commission in its view that services in connection with public health among other considerations ...should be excluded from application of competition and internal market rules". The relevance of this statement for pharmacy services as essential services for public health is evident.

The majority of existing pharmacies have been granted licences under strict regulations since 1984. When the Administration in 1996 repealed these regulations, the chamber and its social partners, representing the non-pharmacy and pharmacist owners, received clear mandates to take a stand because of their firm conviction based on the facts as explained above, and on the direct and continuous communication with our international and European counterparts, including the International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP), the Pharmaceutical Group of the European Union (PGEU), the Commonwealth Pharmaceutical Association (CPA), the EuroPharm Forum of the WHO/Euro together with individual European Pharmaceutical Associations including the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) and the Portuguese and Italian colleagues, to name but a few.

Since 1996, and following the agreement reached with the Administration and signed by the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry endorsed by the then Opposition in 1998, the Tripartite Joint Committee set up by the Minister of Health between the government, the GRTU's pharmacy owners' section and the Malta Chamber of Pharmacists worked intensively to fulfil the terms of reference of the committee as stipulated in the agreement which were:

¤ to submit a draft national plan taking into consideration geographic and demographic criteria which plan should form the basis for the issuing of licences for the opening of pharmacies;

¤ to establish the necessary standard criteria which will insure an improvement in the quality of pharmaceutical services offered in the community;

¤ to submit a proposal for the setting up of a scheme whereby medicinals given by Government in terms of the Social Security Act are dispensed, together with pharmacists' professional interventions from the private community pharmacies of the patients' choice (Pharmacy of Your Choice [POYC] Scheme); and

¤ to submit a report.

The report of the Tripartite Joint Committee was submitted to the Minister of Health in 1999 but to date has never been discussed, despite the insistence of the social partners.

It is the conviction of the chamber and its social partners that the report presents the basis of the way forward for community pharmaceutical services in Malta, as an integral part of the country's primary health care system, mirroring models of practices in the civilised world.

In the pluralistic and democratic society we are living in, pharmacists young and old do indeed receive many messages from myriad sources. The chamber trusts that the members of the profession it upholds, as moulded by the University, are in a position to identify such sources and properly analyze their content.