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Health Bill

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, has made some powerful points, and I agreed with much of what she said. I want to come at this issue from a slightly different angle. In Grand Committee the Minister gave some welcome reassurances on the general principle of one pharmacist/one pharmacy, which I and other noble Lords believe is right. However, the trick the Bill needs to pull off is both to safeguard that general principle while not closing the door to evolution in how pharmacies are run. We are living through a time of considerable change for pharmacy, and it would be unwise to set in stone provisions that do not allow for a certain amount of flexibility within the confines of one pharmacist/one pharmacy. I cite one example. A major pharmacy group is working on a hub-and-spoke idea for dispensing prescriptions. The prescriptions arrive at a central pharmacy, either electronically or from an outlying pharmacy where the patient is. That central pharmacy then dispenses under the supervision of a pharmacist. It then sends the medicines to the outlying pharmacy to be handed to the patient by the pharmacist in that shop; in other words, there is no loss of supervision at any stage of the process. But I suggest that it is the pharmacist at the centre who is really acting as the responsible pharmacist within the terms of the Bill. The point of that idea is to free up time for providing services in the ““spoke”” pharmacies. The pharmacist at the centre plays a superintending role over the other pharmacies in the cluster, but each of those has a pharmacist in them. That is a variation on the theme of one pharmacist per pharmacy. While I hope no one would take issue with the arrangement from a patient safety perspective, the lines are rather blurred, strictly speaking, as to who the responsible pharmacist in that example actually is. Again, we are dependent on the regulations to see how and in what circumstances the Government are prepared to relax the one pharmacist per pharmacy rule. The Minister will need to take care not to go faster than the profession wishes to go, but at the same time to leave room for sensible variations within a framework of maintaining patient safety. That is not by any means an easy balance to strike, but I do not believe it is impossible.