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For Outsider’s money, the RPS is too busy navel-gazing about its future to bother with the real challenges facing pharmacists today

The clock is ticking, the countdown is underway.  It’s now only 18 months until a new cohort of all-singing, all-dancing, and most importantly of all (or not?) – all-prescribing newly-qualified pharmacists break free of their pre-registration chains. Or that is the plan, if you were to believe that there is, indeed, a plan.

Clearly there is a plan. Health Education England, the General Pharmaceutical Council, the National Health Service, the Department of Health and Social Care, Community Pharmacy England (CPE) and of course, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) have all been coherently working together to aid the smooth transition to a new, modern, workforce with prescribing ‘built-in’ from the summer of 2026.

Have you already guessed the punchline? Need I go on? I’m afraid I am contractually obliged.The average cohort of pharmacy graduates applying to the pre-registration exam each summer is 2,700. Typically, over 70 per cent of graduates apply for hospital placements but the majority luck out in a community setting. If we are to even begin to believe there is a plan, we must be assured that those community pharmacy-based graduates are able to be placed with a designated prescribing practitioner (DPP).

Any suitably qualified and inclined independent prescriber can act as the DPP, which is a good thing as there certainly aren’t 1,000 independent prescribers working in community pharmacy today, and those numbers won’t get any better over the next 18 months, begging the question, of well, needing to beg.

Most pre-registration graduates leaving university this summer and expecting a smooth transition over the following year to being a fully-fledged, registered and prescribing pharmacist will find themselves in the position of needing to beg a nurse or a medic to be their DPP. I’m sure that will go swimmingly well.

And yet, even if miracles do occur and every community pharmacy pre-reg – sorry, foundation trainee (Ed: can they do my extension on the cheap?) were to be successfully placed with a DPP and be signed off at the end of the process… what next?

Where are the community pharmacy services that demand the prescribing community pharmacist in the community pharmacy? I see no ships.

It is inconceivable in the current environment that the still nascent – and in far too many areas, nearly non-existent – Pharmacy First service can transition in such a short timescale to demand community pharmacy prescribers. And if it did, what of the other thousands?

The reality is that any meaningful roles for these newly-minted, shiny prescribers will come in roles where they are taken out of their community pharmacy and placed in integrated care system hubs or primary care networks, depriving their local community of much needed care. So what is the alternative?

This is the question many have been looking for the answer to. CPE would be the obvious go-to, but they are firmly acting in ‘stealth mode’ as they precariously navigate a relationship with their paymasters that would not look out of place in a 1970s exploitation movie. Which leaves the RPS.  

Or it should. Unfortunately, the RPS is presently engaged in yet another incongruous bout of navel-gazing and internal genuflection. ‘Royal College’ is the only topic in town decades after all of us crying for a serious conversation about the same were rebuked in the transition from regulator to representative.

While many of us who lived through the agonising of what the RPSGB would become when it lost its true raison d’être of being both poacher and game-keeper, none of us could have predicted its decline. The argument was lost for good with the rise of the Pharmacists’ Defence Association (PDA), now the predominant membership body for pharmacists in the UK.

Yet the one thing the RPS maintained was a sheen of respect among fellow bodies that an upstart such as the PDA could only dream of. History, a Royal Charter, gilt and trimmings. A knock on the door that is always answered.

Instead their main focus appears to be on becoming a charity – a fine idea but requires independence at board level that should be an anathema to a truly representative membership organisation. And a Royal College? It’s like they’re having a fever dream about all the opportunities they had when they were young but have now wasted away.

If there was a time for dreaming about Royal Colleges, it was 15 years ago. Today is for knuckling down and representing the membership (however big or small it may be). There are thousands of newly qualified pharmacists with real dreams on the horizon, and many more thousands of pharmacists who are worried about being left behind as only shop-keepers and pill-counters.  

They do not want or need another new charter. They do not need a new board of trustees. They demand, and pay for, a Royal Society that respects its current charter and serves them and their profession.

Outsider is a community pharmacy commentator