The Telegraph rarely seems to waste an opportunity to get stuck into pharmacy. There was the specials exposé a couple of years back, while readers’ breakfasts last month were enlivened by tales of alleged pharmaceutical industry largesse bestowed upon NHS medicines management officials featuring five-star hotels, gold-plated wastebins, champagne and Jacuzzis...

This month it was the turn of “high street pharmacies” to feel the heat over the plans
to allow them access to NHS summary care records. The paper didn’t like this at all, fearing businesses would use the information to target patients with product promotions (see front-page news).

Now, The Telegraph has an excellent track record in exposing improbity of all kinds and holding people, companies and institutions unswervingly to account. But it got this one badly wrong, as pharmacy bodies were commendably quick to point out.

This is clearly not an issue of unscrupulous companies taking advantage of patient data for commercial gain, but about pharmacists having the right information with the right safeguards in place to improve patient care – nothing more, nothing less.

In fact, the whole episode may have done pharmacy much more good than harm.
To hear pharmacists like locum Cathryn Brown take to the airways and speak so eloquently about the benefits of SCR access, in ways in which patients could easily identify (convenience, safety, better care), was to think that The Telegraph had inadvertently provided the profession with its biggest PR coup in years.

Richard Thomas, Editor