If pushed, we are prepared to concede that there is probably more work involved in organising an Olympic Games than our national meetings. However, the IOC has one great advantage – they only have one at a time and they’ve got years to do the planning. Pharmacy Management currently has no less than four national meetings on the stocks!

First, we have the National Forum for Scotland on 24th August. On 7th October we’ll be in London for a southern version of our successful JoMO-UKCPA meeting on medicines optimisation in diabetes. Just six weeks later, on 16th November, we’ll stage our flagship Forum Workshop in London on medicines optimisation in the frail and elderly patient, a group in whom the management of multiple long term conditions adds real complexity. And on 1st February next year we’ll collaborate with UKCPA once more, this time on medicines optimisation in respiratory conditions.

These collaborations work really well. Professional colleagues help us identify topics with high relevance to the audience, and then to find good speakers to deliver them. Despite the difficult conditions we all face today, there is no shortage of appetite for good learning opportunities.

It’s very easy to tell ourselves we’ll try to sort out our CPD in the odd moments between elements of the day job, but it rarely seems to happen. Days like these four give us a break to refresh, recharge and renew. They make a grand day out for a team too.

When you arrive we put a cup of coffee in your hand and let you start networking. it’s not much of an Opening Ceremony, but it’s been a popular one.

Around 6 out of every 7 people in the UK live in England. Most of the pharmaceutical industry is based within its borders. The greater part of the hospitals and the primary care organisations are in England. For some of our competitors, that’s a reason for concentrating on England.

We’ve never done that. We work in all the home countries, each of which is producing good work that can profitably be shared with neighbours. Just today we’re putting finishing touches to the PM Academy meeting in Wales, working on the publicity for the PM National Forum for Scotland and setting up meetings to progress a Clinical Leadership in Pharmacy project for the whole of Ireland. On our Events page we have separate listings for each of the countries.

What can we say about the five countries? The people are different. The NHS is different – of course, it does not extend to the Republic of Ireland. The issues they face are different. There is no single answer to all those challenges – but then we’ve always known there isn’t in England either. Whether it’s Portsmouth and Southampton, Newcastle and Sunderland or Leeds and Bradford, you don’t have to go far to find real differences. We’re not a company that believes that one trick we know will work everywhere.

It’s good that we’re different and that each nation is making its own choices on health. We’re ready to do our bit to support them all.

This is Berwick-upon-Tweed. It’s a lovely little place, well worth a visit. At various times it has found itself on either side of the Anglo-Scottish border. Neither country has ever insisted that the other should have it.

At the last census it had a population of about 12,000. That’s why it’s here on this blog. NHS England has just published “Improving the Physical Health of People with Serious Mental Illness” which contains the shocking comment that “Estimates suggest there would be up to 12,000 fewer deaths from cardiovascular disease (CVD) if people with SMI had the same outcomes as the general population.”

Just think of that a moment. It’s as if we allowed the whole population of Berwick-upon-Tweed to die each year when they didn’t need to. As a number it’s appalling enough, but if you visualise it as the people of a small border town, it begins to sound like a horror movie.

The difference is that in a horror movie there’s usually nothing that can be done to ward off the fate, but in this case we can – and must – take action to protect these vulnerable patients.

At our highly successful JoMO-UKCPA workshop on diabetes earlier this month attendees could hear James Lee (Senior Clinical Pharmacist, Exeter, East & Mid Devon, Devon Partnership Trust) and Michael Marven (Chief Pharmacist & Clinical Director for Medicines Management, Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust) speaking about the need to address this problem and how practice in mental health has to change to do so. But this is not a problem to be solved only by mental health professionals. Every healthcare professional who cares for a patient with serious mental illness has to address their physical health needs too.

Here at Pharmacy Management we believe that mental illnesses are usually long term conditions and have to be managed as such. It’s bad enough having a long term condition, but to have a long term condition that predisposes to another long term condition, or whose treatment causes another long term condition is a double blow. That’s why we applaud NHS England for giving this such prominence, and that’s why we’ll be returning to the subject from time to time. Those 12,000 people demand no less.

 

As a student in Aberdeen, I lived close to the site of the city’s medieval leper hospital. You’ll find it near the end of Gallowgate, just a short step from the site of the gallows themselves. This was not coincidental; the city fathers hit on the idea of hanging any lepers who were found to have left the hospital grounds, so it was convenient to have the gallows nearby. (Edinburgh went a step further and had a gallows built projecting from the gable of their leper house, just to remind the inmates.)

As a public health measure, preventing the spread of contagion by killing people who contract it may be effective – the hospital was empty and in ruins by 1661 – but it has some obvious drawbacks. Even in medieval Scotland, hanging people for being ill was seen as lacking compassion, and some observers noted that the likeliest reason for having leprosy was that you had been on a Crusade, which might discourage people from signing up for similar adventures in the future. All in all, breaking off all contact, while superficially attractive, really was not an option.

There is a loose parallel with the knee jerk reaction of some to the press disclosures of links between the pharmaceutical industry and NHS advisers. Breaking off all contact is unnecessary and highly undesirable. NHS England has committed itself to a programme of joint working which will grind to a halt if the constituent NHS bodies segregate themselves.

Our commitment to transparency and good governance is, we hope, well known. To be frank, we were disappointed that good people who were named in the press simply because they had made proper disclosures were not defended more effectively. So much so, that we will back up our Charter with this additional pledge.

If you work with us and make proper disclosures of your involvement we will stand ready to speak up for you.

The press stories were not investigative journalism. There would have been no story if those people had not made full disclosures. But there is an additional dimension.

The stories related to advisory boards. Pharmacy Management has run such boards in the past, but they are rarely needed now. Why? Because the purpose of an advisory board is that a company can clue itself up on a question to which it does not know the answer – and the aim of Pharmacy Management is to ensure that they know the answer before they know they had a question. We seek to provide opportunities for both sides to keep themselves informed through our events. It’s a much better way.

The Telegraph stories also implied that advisory boards were promotional. If there is any promotional activity they are not advisory boards. We keep promotional activity at our events to designated areas and there is absolutely none at any advisory board or focus group that we run.

Our continued success depends on doing things the right way. As Shakespeare says:

The purest treasure mortal times afford is spotless reputation.

We agree – both ours, and yours.

A colleague’s daughter was studying for her GCSE in English, which required her to read Susan Hill’s book “The Woman in Black”. Rather than actually read the book, she hit on the idea of watching a video of the film which, as she sweetly put it, meant she didn’t have to read “all those words”.

There is a strong case for saying that if you’re studying English, “all those words” are probably quite important and actually reading them would be a good move. But if you want to collect factual information, the old saying that a picture paints a thousand words has much to commend it.

That’s why the NHS communicates in posters. Ideas are more easily shared in pictorial form and NHS staff naturally gravitate towards posters because they can scan a group of posters quicker and more efficiently than they might read a similar number of abstracts.

This is particularly important because the only way the quality of pharmacy interventions can be proved is by collecting sufficient numbers to show statistical significance, and that is likely to require multi-centre working. That’s why we repeatedly say we don’t want people to wait until they complete their work before sharing their ideas – spreading the word to others may help to create the mass needed to get to the answer quicker.

It’s odd that the pharmaceutical industry, which has a lot of experience of conveying information pictorially in advertisements, has been so slow to use posters to convey factual information. Those that have tried it have found posters a fruitful method of communicating with the NHS.

If you have an idea, why not put it in a poster? And if you need help to get started, we’ll work with you to support that. Our events contain ample opportunities to get your idea in front of many others. Just picture that!