Pharmacy-of-your-choice: Winners and losers

The proposed first phase of the Pharmacy of Your Choice system is far from what the Chamber of Pharmacists preaches: that it has brought about the recognition of pharmacists as professionals. The Chamber has agreed, with the GRTU and the government, on the principle that health centre pharmacists will be working basically as packers for the private pharmacies. The pharmacists will be preparing packs of medication at the health centres for delivery to private pharmacies and collection by patients. How degrading is that? Pharmacists working as packers!

The Chamber should not have accepted this in its negotiations, even though it does not represent government pharmacists. This is just like the outdated bereg(district clinics) system, the system patients have refused to use since it is very inconvenient to have to visit the clinic twice a month instead of the one stop at health centres.

I can understand now why private employed pharmacists feel unprotected by the Chamber. The Chamber never did anything to minimise the abuse private employed pharmacists encounter, like having to act as salesmen/girls for the cosmetics, perfumes, hairdryers and all other non pharmacy related items found in a private pharmacy. It is about time these private employed pharmacists speak out and not accept everything.

The UHM is therefore right to say that it is the pharmacy owners who will benefit from the new scheme and surely not the private employed pharmacists. The only thing they will be getting is an increase in workload. On the contrary the pharmacy owner (mostly not pharmacists) will be getting Lm8 per patient per year. Some simple maths: 140,000 entitled patients X Lm8 = Lm1,120,000! Divided by about 202 pharmacies this adds up to a Lm5,544 a year bonus to these competition-free businessmen, from the taxpayers' money! To top it all, they will be getting this amount of money even though most of the work will be performed by the pharmacist packers at the health centres.

Had the government invested just a fraction of this amount per year in its own pharmacies there surely would not have been any queues and a much better service.

Why did the government stop taking in new pharmacists over the years despite many resignations coupled by the ever increasing number of patients? The UHM had warned the government many times about the need for reinforcement but it never came. Why did it not invest some of this money to modernise its pharmacies? Now, instead, it is ready to fork out millions to private pharmacy owners.

The reality is that this is just a political move by the government to gain votes for the coming election. It has been forced to adopt a makeshift Pharmacy of Your Choice scheme due to the simple fact that there is no time to prepare a proper system before the election. Their only excuse will be that phase two will follow and a better system (like UK's) will be available in the future. In the meantime we will need to yield this extra cash to the pharmacy owners for a system that not even the patient is going to like.

I think that the health centre pharmacists should stay strong and not allow themselves to be used for political and commercial ends. Pharmacists may also want to consider working over here in the UK - at least you are respected over here as a pharmacist and you are paid as one too!