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Pharmacy should use the term €customers€ not €patients€ as a way of advancing the self-care agenda, delegates were told. RPS English Pharmacy Board vice-chair Ash Soni said: €We should call people customers... because it makes them less dependent and therefore they can share in making decisions about their health.€

Peter Dawson, locum pharmacist and columnist for The Guardian newspaper, agreed: €There is a tendency to paternalism if we say patients.€ Self-care is about demedicalising health and using the term customers instead of patients was a way of achieving this."