Terms and conditions Barrie Brown, one of the Lead Officers for Health within Unite, attended the terms and conditions meeting to update members on various items.
Pay Review Body - It is still not known how the role of the Pay Review Body will be affected by the election of the Con-Dem Coalition. The English Health White Paper states that all local employers will have the ability to negotiate pay levels. Has AfC been thrown out of the window? It remains to be seen. It has been suggested that the pay spines might be lost, but the job evaluation system retained. Is the potential loss of EDA a negative RRP? Karen Reay has written to Lord Howe, the Minister with responsibility for pharmacy, but has yet to receive an answer.
It was reported that in a trawl of 25 organisations, there were 302 on-call agreements covering 6000 staff. Any new agreement in an organisation must cover ALL staff.
Modernising Pharmacy Careers There was discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of the Pre-registration year being integrated with the undergraduate course, with students spending part of each year in hospitals
It was also reported that a new syllabus for pre-reg training would be out in January 2011 with a proposed examination date of June 2011!
Responsible Pharmacist Regulations GHP is looking for scenarios where there is still doubt about the applicability of the RP regs. Please send any such information to me.
Supervision Regulations These are due out soon and GHP are keen to ensure that proper hospital input into the process is achieved from the start. We are therefore asking members for scenarios where supervision as currently defined would be involved, so that we have plenty examples for the writers.
Royal Pharmaceutical Society There was a presentation by Catherine Duggan on how the RPS intends to work in partnership with other groups. There appears to have been a complete change in the way that RPS sees this working; giving a much better chance of success!
Colin Rodden 15 July 2010