Keith Ridge showed his true colours at the recent chief pharmaceutical officer’s conference. His antipathy towards community pharmacy has plunged to new depths, says independent proprietor Graham Phillips.

Had there been any doubts about the deep antipathy Dr Keith Ridge, England’s chief pharmaceutical officer, appears to have towards community pharmacy, it was surely dispelled during last month’s CPO’s conference.

He spoke for 20 minutes and only mentioned community pharmacy once (and not in a good way).

During his speech he went to great lengths to praise “clinical pharmacy practice” on a sector-by-sector basis, while omitting any mention of community pharmacy. But hey, I guess being 75 per cent of the profession, we are such a small minority interest group as to be insignificant.

Dr Ridge then turned his attention to the critical subject of antimicrobial resistance – a subject so crucial to the future of mankind it ranks second only to global warming in terms of the size of the threat. Still no mention of community pharmacy.

Then, rather randomly, he turned to the subject of retirement: specifically his own. At this point, I was actually starting to think I might like this speech. Sadly, it turned out to be the triumph of hope over expectation. He was, he said, going nowhere.

Alternative facts

And then – at long last – community pharmacy did get a mention, along with some, what we might call, ‘alternative facts’. Dr Ridge reminded us that, according to the GPhC’s prototype inspection scheme, only four of the nation’s pharmacies are rated as excellent – but the pivotal word here is “prototype”.

The scheme itself has proved controversial and the GPhC has admitted that it has yet to define clearly what “excellent” looks like. So, put another way, pharmacies were not found to be “excellent” because there was not really any such properly defined category. Somehow this didn’t seem to trouble the CPO.

Keith ‘hub-’n-spoke’ Ridge is no stranger to the propagation of alternative facts. Remember how he massively exaggerated the level of dispensing errors made by community pharmacists when giving evidence to the All-Party Pharmacy Group? He claimed it was a staggering 3 per cent. Just think about it – 3 per cent of well over one billion annual prescription items. There’d be bodies in the streets.

Eventually Ridge was prevailed upon to clarify his position and even offered a half-apology but his agenda was clear: community pharmacists should be replaced by “clinical” pharmacists (working in GP surgeries) and the likes of Amazon could do the rest.

So, was this the final mention community pharmacy got? Not exactly. An LPC colleague, picking up on one of Ridge’s themes, asked about independent prescribing in community pharmacy. Ridge had waxed lyrical about the value of independent prescribing in every sector bar – you guessed it – community. His response was effectively: by all means (if you leave community pharmacy and become a practice pharmacist).

That man has got to go.

He spoke for 20 minutes and only mentioned community pharmacy once