Clause 25 - Control of pharmacy premises: individuals and partnerships
Health Bill
3:30 pm
Steve Webb (Shadow Secretary of State for Health, Health; Northavon, Liberal Democrat)
In her response on clause 24, the Minister indicated that some of our remarks might have been more appropriately directed at clause 25, and I apologise if that was the case. However, I just want to gnaw away further on the issue of supervision.
Would it be accurate to say that we are dealing in clause 25 with a calculated risk? I do not say that pejoratively; I simply think that that, objectively, is what we are doing. For the past 37 years, we have said that a pharmacist must be present, and if they nipped out to the loo or went over the road, the pharmacy could not sell medicines. We are now saying that we want pharmacists to do other things, so we will allow pharmacies to make available medicines that they have not been allowed to make available for the past 37 years without a pharmacist being present. We are trying to minimise the risk arising from that relaxation of the rules by setting out in regulations who can sell medicines and in what circumstances.
My question is whether the Government have done any risk assessment on clause 25. There must be a risk associated with selling medicines without a pharmacist being present, when they would hitherto never have been sold with a pharmacist present. There must be a risk associated with the pharmacist being on the other end of a webcam or a phone and not being physically present. How big a risk is that? Has the nature of that risk been assessed? How far will the regulations limit that risk?
Do the Government envisage that in the vast majority of cases a pharmacist will still be physically present? That is an important question for us on these Benches. Is the regime that is envisaged one in which pharmacists will have a bit of spare time in which they can be away from the premises if they have to do something worth while, but that that will be exceptional—the norm will still be that the main pharmacist attached to one set of premises will be there? Alternatively, are we envisaging a world in which, because we are convinced that the change is very low risk and there are enough trained people out there to cover for them, pharmacists will play a light-touch supervisory role? Are we changing from hands-on, got-to-be-on-the-premises people, without whom nothing can be sold, to a regime of light-touch oversight of several premises? How far down that route do the Government expect clause 25 to take us?