GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

take them a couple of terms. With pharmacists their life is often in your hands.

If they make a mistake, unlike doctors, unlike nurses, they are criminally

responsible and could not only lose their job, their career, but can also lose

their freedom, the legislation around management of medicines being tighter

than that round the rest of medical care. Our members are across the UK, in

the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. They are in hospitals, they are in

primary care like your local GP practice and they are in community pharmacy,

by which I mean the high street chemist which is probably the most accessible

part of the National Health Service. Clearly, if you have a zero hours contract

and you phone your doctor for an appointment, you cannot guarantee you are

going to be available at 3 o’clock next Tuesday, because you do not know

when your shifts are coming, but you can walk off the street and see a

pharmacist and those experts can give you very sound pharmaceutical care.

Many of our members are locums, so we are affected by the gig economy.

There is actually in many places, in most places a surplus of pharmacists, so

all the pressures of the gig economy come to bear on those people and we

have got the usual issues of anyone else that is working in that sector. As I

said, we have been around for 10 years. Through an organisation called

EPhEU, which is the Employed Pharmacists of the European Union, which has

been around for seven years, we are quite active in that European area and we

have been helping in setting up the Polish pharmacists union, so we are very

international. I will not try and pronounce the name of the Polish Union. It is the

ZZPF, some very long words.

John mentioned Boots. I said that community pharmacy is the most

accessible part of the NHS. Our members are also, as I say, health

professionals, but they are delivering patient care whilst employed by what is

essentially a retailer that wants profit, so there is this conflict for our members.

Our members face the same sort of issues we all face, which is bad

management, unreasonable targets, health and safety, but they are also trying

to manage patient care and put that rightfully at the top of their agenda where

often their employer wants profit. I will spend a minute or two quickly to tell you

about Boots, because in most union circles when I say I am from the PDAU I

get a blank look, but if I mention Boots people very often have heard of us and

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