- This article is the subject of a legal complaint made on behalf of Boots UK Limited.
Pharmacists join their vocation because they want nothing more than to be able to use clinical skills to make beneficial differences to the lives of patients. Boots employs 6,000 pharmacists and its pharmacies dominate high streets throughout the UK. However, following our patient safety surveys of Boots pharmacists, it is apparent that large numbers feel that they have been severely hampered in doing so. The business culture you have recently revealed, which makes use of relentless and unacceptable targeting of NHS funds through medicine use reviews, coupled with intolerable working conditions, is a scandal that has caused widespread concern and anger (How Boots went rogue, 13 April).
That’s why the changes in the company’s senior UK management are so important to its customers and to NHS patients (Boots UK boss quits, 9 June). We sincerely hope that the new Boots managing director heralds a change in business culture within that organisation. One that no longer relentlessly places targets upon its pharmacists in its pursuit of vast profits and double-digit growth, irrespective of the impact that it has on patients. A new business culture that allows Boots pharmacists to practise with professional autonomy and gives them sufficient time and support to build meaningful clinical relationships with patients. If the new managing director could achieve that, then she would go a long way to restoring the company’s image, as well as relieving the current pressures on the NHS. This would be to the benefit of the public, pharmacists and taxpayers.
Mark Koziol
Assistant general secretary, Pharmacists’ Defence Association Union
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