You have to act now to change the future of pharmacy, says Manor Pharmacy’s Graham Phillips

We’re all familiar with the concept of make every contact count (MECC) in pharmacy, but here’s a new one: Make Every Political Contact Count. Community pharmacy needs to get out there, and that means all of us getting involved – talking about the clinical, public health and social capital value of pharmacy and the threats to the network.

We need much stronger representation at the grass roots level, and I can tell you that YOU (all of you) are perfectly qualified to play your part. Start today! The good news is that you don’t need to be working at a national level or in high-powered meetings with CCGs, because you already have hundreds of opportunities a day to get the word out from the pharmacy you work in.

We are the third largest health profession. We have more patient contacts per day than the rest put together. Collectively, we have 11,500 shop windows and around two million (!) daily opportunities to influence. Imagine if every single pharmacist picked just three things significant to them to really shout about, and then put that into action for, say, three months – it would be transformational.

I often hear pharmacists moan about the inadequacies of the professional bodies, often with some justification, but moaning changes nothing – what are you going to do about it? You don’t have to be on a national body, because there’s loads you can do to influence the national picture from where you are now.

Community pharmacy is way too accepting of the status quo. Look at the Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba case and the outcry there’s been from the medical profession. The entire profession has gone ballistic. Compare that with the situation where a single dispensing error that can put a pharmacist in a jail, which has gone on for 10 years. There’s been no ‘ballistic’ from us – it’s not even in our vocabulary.

If we were a lot more unreasonable a lot more often, people wouldn’t take us so much for granted.

Personally, I spend time on Twitter, sharing views and making sure that MPs, in particular, get the message about community pharmacy. On my own patch, I’ve spent years building relationships with councillors, MPs and GPs. I haven’t done anything spectacular, but I have done it. It could be that local junior councillor you spend 10 minutes with is the leader of the council next year; a year after that a parliamentary candidate; then an MP and then a junior minister. Eventually, that’s Chancellor Philip Hammond – who is in complete ignorance of pharmacy and thinks we are “over subsidised dolersout of medicines”. Imagine, if we’d kept in touch with him all the way through his political career; he might not now think like that.

If you think that community pharmacy deserves a better future, use your voice, right here, right now, to make sure that it does. “Those who turn up take the decisions,” said US president Benjamin Franklin. So true. That’s how democracy works.

This topic was the basis of a presentation made at the Sigma Conference 2018. To get more involved, contact the NPA on Twitter, Faceboook or through npa.co.uk