Liberalisation of pharmacies

I refer to your report "Pharmacists, GRTU set to clash with Government" (December 7). While I could see the GRTU's point, because after all, business is business, it still baffles me that no similar regulations safeguard the interests of say, ironmongerers, hairstylists, butchers, to mention a few categories also represented by the GRTU!

If we take pharmacy as a purely professional entity - excluding cosmetics, hair products, sweets, and many other non-medicinal items - it also baffles me how dentists, doctors, lawyers, and other professional people remain silent! After all, who likes competition?

On the other hand, I cannot understand how Mary Ann Sant Fournier (Chamber of Pharmacists) speaks about pharmacy as a medical profession and about her chamber as the only union that officially represents pharmacists in Malta (prior to UHM's official recognition by the public sector), and yet she agrees to join forces with a business organisation! At the press conference she said that with the new regulations "we risk having a therapeutic jungle"!

This expression also baffles me because you find a 'jungle' when you have people queuing for 15 minutes in a pharmacy anxiously waiting to be served only to be told that the medicine prescribed by your doctor is unavailable and the next pharmacy is quite some distance away - unless you prefer to buy an alternative product offered by the pharmacist.

Last Sunday you reported Ms Sant Fournier as saying that there is now a pharmacy for every 1,866 residents and the government is proposing a ratio of 1,600 per pharmacy; so why all the fuss for 266 inhabitants! But the chamber wants to keep a ratio of one pharmacy for every 3,000 inhabitants to make it practically impossible for one to establish a new pharmacy unless they start opening on Comino!

Besides, is the number of Pharmacy graduates now, after the points system was eliminated by the present government, the same as when these restrictions were included in the Medical and Kindred Professions Ordinance first published in 1984? Or the rate in most European universities, considering the size of the population?

Is the standard of living the same as it was 20 years ago? Nowadays, when a woman goes to a pharmacy, after asking for prescribed medicines, she may decide to buy a facial anti-wrinkle product, or a box of branded slimming tablets, a tube of smokers' toothpaste, a packet of contraceptives and some quality chocolate for her kids. These products were unheard of or banned 20 years ago!

In The Sunday Times of August 25, 2002, I criticised the Chamber of Pharmacists for being lethargic because it never addressed the public sector seriously. But they are not as sleepy as I thought because every time their interests are somehow affected they start threatening action, thus forgetting all about the patients they so 'humbly' serve, as happened in 1996 when pharmacies were going to be completely liberalised.

I believe that competition is healthy. How can we speak of a more modern and liberal society in the light of Malta's accession to the European Union and still the Health Minister is proposing a figure of one pharmacy per 1,600 inhabitants! Although this is great improvement over the 1984 figure of 1:3,000, it still does not tally with the fact that University doors are wide open to students wishing to graduate in pharmacy.

Since, apparently, the government cannot keep on absorbing young graduates indefinitely, and that medical representation is saturated, and industrial and academic posts are very limited, what are the prospects for tomorrow's pharmacists? Are they all going abroad?

I think that both the chamber and the GRTU just want it only their way, no matter what patients, students, the 300 pending pharmacy applicants, or the Consumers' Association have to say. From my past union experience with UHM, negotiations are usually based on a give-and-take basis, each side gaining something in return.

Finally, I note that pharmacy owners wished to charge the Government at least Lm5 per patient requesting free medicines, for just a couple of minutes! They know how to get paid, but ask them about the pay and conditions they offer when one seeks employment with them!