Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 80:"Page 26, line 3, at end insert—" ““(   )   the activities which the responsible pharmacist must personally supervise whilst present on the premises,”” The noble Earl said: The amendment covers what activities the responsible pharmacist must personally supervise while on the pharmacy premises. Again, I have tabled this purely as a probing amendment. There has been a good deal of debate about this within the pharmacy profession. I do not presume to have all the answers, but the issue is important. Traditionally, it was a given that the dispensing and sale of all medicines and related products had to be personally supervised by the pharmacist in charge. Nowadays this is commonly subject to some relaxation and flexibility, according to circumstances. Most staff in a pharmacy have had some sort of formal training; many have demonstrated competency within the framework of standard operating procedures and protocols. In practice, the pharmacist and his or her staff will work together, with the pharmacist having delegated certain tasks and responsibilities to those staff who can handle them safely and without direct supervision. For example, general sales list medicines can already be sold by trained pharmacy staff under a delegated authority when the pharmacist is on the premises. I hope I am right in saying that. As we consider this clause, it should not be an issue to suggest that such staff should be able to sell OTC medicines when the pharmacist is not there. Even where a medicine is on prescription, appropriately trained staff can easily undertake the more mechanical parts of the dispensing process. There is no reason why they should not do so if the pharmacist is happy that it will be done safely. However, the pharmacist himself is still the only person capable, in a professional sense, of checking new and amended prescriptions and of giving advice to patients on how such prescription medicines should be used. There may also be circumstances in which even OTC medicines need to be handed over to the customer by the pharmacist in person or where the sale of a non-prescription medicine should be referred by a member of staff to the pharmacist for further advice. To a considerable extent, professional practice and its underpinning legislation have to move with the times. But it will normally be a matter for the standard operating procedures and protocols, as well as the training of individual staff, to determine those circumstances in which direct input from the pharmacist is necessary and those where it is not. Amendment No. 80 is principally designed to flag up these issues in a probing fashion. I appreciate that regulations as such will not be capable of encapsulating detailed rules about what, in the end, are matters of professional judgment and competence—we should not expect them to—but they can make provision for these issues to be covered elsewhere, whether in professional codes of practice or by means of appropriate training. Regulations can certainly get us closer to a satisfactory definition of what we mean by the idea of professional control, which as I said earlier, is an idea we should not depart from totally. If they can do that, they will bring us much closer to more satisfactory criteria for determining the circumstances where direct pharmacist supervision should and should not be mandatory. Amendment No. 81 is a probing amendment designed to seek clarity from the Minister on the issue of whether a pharmacist can supervise activities at another pharmacy of which he is not the responsible pharmacist, and if so, in what circumstances. As I said when I spoke to an earlier amendment, Amendment No. 77, I hope and expect that the circumstances in which this could happen will be rare and exceptional. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say in addition to any comments he made earlier. I beg to move.