The RPS framework: what it should be like

The RPS framework: what it should be like

My recent blog about the RPS LPF night at Sunderland University has kept me thinking for a very long time. The guest speaker had made several points about how the new RPS would reflect what we wanted from it; how it would bend to the needs of pharmacy and be the society we wanted it to be.  

However, she only seemed to mention what we did actually want once. Her words have echoed in my mind ever since and now I feel I have come up with a solution to her problems. Apparently, pharmacists want the new society to be much more like a Royal College (of Nursing/Surgeons/Physicians/GP’s). This seems a wonderful idea but seems to be something that hasn’t been implemented all too well. 

Personally I think pharmacists want all the smaller representative bodies and working groups to join together to become one fantastical representation of pharmacy. In reality, this is not going to happen.  

We need the RPS to be is an umbrella, an umbrella that encompasses all the bodies of representation, separate from the unions, to give each branch of pharmacy an opportunity to speak, be heard and have their power focussed. Rather than a royal college, we need the RPS to operate more like an academy; a force which supports the individual constituent bodies, and channels the power behind those groups to rally the cause of pharmacy.

The Guild, The Defence Association, The CCD, The NPA and any other body should liquidise and implore their members to join new ‘colleges’ within the Society. For example, a College of Community Pharmacists, A College of Clinical/Hospital Pharmacists, A College of Academic Pharmacists, Industrial Pharmacists. This would not only allow for specialities within the profession, but would also allow for the ‘credentials’ the speaker pleaded for, to be delivered.

A pharmacist would join a particular ‘college’ within the RPS, and that pharmacist would get the credentials relevant to their day to day work, e.g. a community pharmacist could get the suffix CCPharm, equally an academic pharmacist could be given the credentials CAPharm. This is of course, all just a suggestion, a suggestion that will probably be missed by those who need to see it.