Response of the Guild of Healthcare Pharmacists
to Planning Together - the Final Report of the Scottish Integrated Workforce Planning Group - and the Response by the Scottish Executive Health Department



General Comments

The Guild of Healthcare Pharmacists is supportive of the aims of this document and welcomes its publication. Hospital pharmacy has suffered in the past from service developments which have not taken the wider ramifications into account when being approved. Anything which improves this situation will be appreciated.

We are also very interested in this area due to the significant recruitment and retention problems faced by hospital pharmacy in the present climate. Difficulties in recruiting both pharmacists and support staff at all grades are being experienced nationwide. Within pharmacy as a whole, community pharmacy is the biggest competitor for pharmacists and offers better salary and conditions packages than are available within the NHS. The fact that the vast majority of registered pharmacists work as community pharmacy contractors makes our profession significantly different from others within the NHS.

The introduction of the new roles for pharmacists detailed in "The Right Medicine - A Strategy for Pharmaceutical Care in Scotland" makes it vitally important that proper workforce planning for pharmacy be undertaken by SEHD. The alternative is that the goals in the strategy are rendered unattainable by lack of manpower.

back to top

SEHD response
Delivering the Functions: the nature of national, regional and local systems
Regional Centres

It is disappointing that there is no mention in paragraph 22 of the advisory forum including any professional or staff side representatives. This would be extremely important given paragraph 32, bullet point 3, where these centres are to provide expertise on a range of workforce aspects. It is only in paragraph 36 that links with local professional and staff side interests are mentioned, with no indication of how this may be achieved or facilitated.

back to top

Planning Together
Paragraphs 3.9-3.12
There would appear to be significant training issues involved. How long will it take to bring current management up to the level of expertise required by the report? Given the current financial situations of many trusts, is the resource available to carry out the training - both trainers and trainees?

back to top

Recommendation 6 and paragraph 3.18
As a member of Staff Side Pharmaceutical Whitley Council which negotiates all UK terms and conditions for hospital pharmacists, I would ask to what extent this report will be taken into consideration by the Department of Health in future negotiations. Will training in workforce planning issues be afforded to both Management and Staff Sides? The effect of pay modernisation on such negotiations remains to be seen.

back to top

Recommendation 11 and paragraph 4.7
We note that service development business cases are to take cognisance of workforce planning issues. One of the largest risks is that the number of staff trained and delivered is not the same as that envisaged. If it is decided that a development requires 100 newly trained nurses and only 70 can actually be in post on day 1 with no prospect of any more arriving for at least six months, what can be done? It is important that this risk be fully recognised and taken into consideration in the business cases. We also hope that this will end the current situation where new services are developed or current services extended without any input from or recognition of the resource demands the development will make on other services such as pharmacy. This has been the pattern in the past. There has rarely been any account taken of the impact on financial, human or intellectual resources of the pharmacy. Pharmacy has always been expected to cope. We hope this will also extend to short term issues such as waiting list initiatives where hospital pharmacies are expected to cope with increased discharge prescriptions without warning or resourcing.

back to top

Paragraph 5.5
We would concur that the health sector is becoming less attractive. A joint subgroup of the Pharmaceutical Whitley Council has extensively examined the recruitment and retention problems within hospital pharmacy and agreed that significant problems exist. It has also investigated the range of packages used by different trusts to try and ensure they can attract and keep the calibre of staff they require. Whilst it might be impossible for the NHS to compete with the salaries and employment packages of community pharmacy multiples, some effort should be made to reduce the disparity between them to ensure the retention of staff that the NHS has paid significant amounts of money to train. The difference in salaries means that it is extremely unlikely that anyone qualified for 5 years or over will move from community to hospital. The drop in salary would be too great. It is notable that very few trusts have made any effort to use the flexibility in pay that currently exists within Whitley Council agreements. It is important to note that pharmacy is different from many of the other professions within the NHS in that the vast majority of pharmacists are employed in the community situation as contractors. It is the minority that are directly employed by Trusts.

It is a source of concern that the recent publication "The Right Medicine - A Pharmaceutical Care Strategy for Scotland" does not target skill mix and staffing until 2005. Given that it takes a four year university course to gain a pharmacy qualification and another year post-graduation before being registered as a pharmacist, it will realistically be 2010 before any solution is achieved.

back to top

Paragraphs 5.34-5.39
It is disappointing that there is no mention whatsoever of pharmacy in this section. A document along similar lines to the strategy paper for healthcare scientists mentioned in paragraph 5.38 is currently under preparation. It would be helpful to have this taken into consideration when published.

back to top

The Guild of Healthcare Pharmacists

The Guild of Healthcare Pharmacists represents pharmacists working in the managed sector of the Health Service. It is responsible for negotiation of all UK terms and conditions through the Pharmaceutical Whitley Council structure and for all national and local negotiations involving pharmacists within the managed sector.

 

Colin Rodden
Secretary for Scotland
Guild of Healthcare Pharmacists

back to top