Regional Member for Scotland Report from Guild Council Meeting 13.5.10



Council

Agenda for change
Emergency Duty - There was some discussion on the latest developments i.e. that it is likely to be a framework for local determination. Many people, though, have not registered the fact that it will cover ALL staff. There will not be multiple agreements - one for pharmacy, one for labs etc. It may well be difficult then to get agreement. The Staff Council were meeting today to sign off the recommendations of the on-call subgroup. The survey of services has reduced to a questionnaire, two sides of A4 in length. It will try to ascertain what on-call costs at the moment. The subgroup has two meetings planned for early June to look at the returns. The implementation date of 31.3.11 is set in stone and will not change. Any local agreements must be organisation-wide, not departmental. Management in Scotland is seeking to consider the whole of Scotland as "local" and have a Scotland wide solution.

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President's Report
Since the start of the year, the President has been producing a monthly blog to inform members what he has been doing on behalf of GHP. This can be found here .

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Modernising Pharmacy Careers
Running under the auspices of Medical Education England, this work will nevertheless have UK ramifications. The problem, however, is that few people know what is going on as most information is confidential. The President is to respond to an MPC stakeholder Survey on behalf of the GHP.

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Integrated Pre-registration Year
According to a meeting of academic representatives, this was likely to go ahead in September 2011 - notwithstanding the current lack of a syllabus or buy-in from other stakeholders. Many questions still remain to be answered e.g.

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Terms and Conditions
Dave Thornton reported on a meeting with Mike O'Brien, Pharmacy Minister in the last Government, in early April. The representatives of the Dept. of Health asked where was the risk to patients from excessive pharmacist vacancies, implying that pharmacists provided no benefit to patient safety!

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Meeting with Two Chief Pharmacists
A useful meeting was held on the Friday with two of the four UK Chief Pharmacists. This was attended by Bill Scott, Norman Morrow (NI), Dave Miller (GHP President), Richard Cattell (GHP Immediate Past President), Roisin O'Hare (GHP Education & Development Lead), Michele Sehrawat (GHP National Secretary Wales) and myself as National Secretary for Scotland. Topics discussed included MPC, integration of the pre-reg year into the undergraduate course, provision of medicines by private companies and VAT.

Colin Rodden
14 May 2010

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