What The Pharmacists See On The MMA’S President Desk After 100 Days.

YH connected the various articles that appeared recently:

The Berita MMA publication over the present MMA President first 100 days http://202.144.202.76/mps/newsmaster.cfm?&menuid=37&action=view&retrieveid=3053

NST report on “Unfair for hospitals to open feeder clinics” http://202.144.202.76/mps/newsmaster.cfm?&menuid=36&action=view&retrieveid=3052

What the MMA’s president wrote about us and …. ? In simple words, the answer is, he does not know the difference between chicken and egg, I mean between pharmacist as professional and pharmacy as a profession. Which means, he cannot differentiate between the practitioners, the practice and the territory of pharmacy. When he answered “NO” to separation between dispensing and prescribing citing about the public naïve about the role of pharmacist, this should also include doctor’s naïve about our role and standard of pharmacy practice, what it means by the gold standard in pharmaceutical care.

I have come across many serious incidents in Malaysia, including serious injuries and death, when the doctors denied responsibility for patients who suffered severe side effects from the drugs. We all know that pharmaceutical care advocates the pharmacist to be responsible for the provision of drug therapy for improving the patients quality of life, which means taking responsibility for the decision to supply medicines to the patient including all consequences that can happen to the patients, while to the doctors it is because the drugs that decide to harm the patients, not them.

That is why the MMA’s president simply wrote, while fee splitting is unethical to medical practice, but not pharmaceutical fees. To him pharmaceutical services is no different from the business of selling fruits, that is the reason why the price should be left to the market forces.

Now the GPs are meeting with their own unfortunate fate when the business owners of the private hospitals start downstream to outreach walk-in patients at their own outpatients clinics. They start preaching professional issues like doctors in the clinics are paid to refer patients to their own hospitals, affecting the livelihood of the GPs operating without specialist support and by professional standard the GPs are suppose to act like gatekeepers to keep the patients right to choose hospitals without considering the issue of inconvenience.

Because of this, the GPs incomes have to be reduced by undercutting each other in order to remain competitive. Does this sounds familiar with our won issue with the GPs, when the retail pharmacies have to undercut each other without the support of a system that separates prescribing from dispensing?

Next time, when MPS or pharmacy programs run awareness campaign, the first target group should be the doctors.