Draft Pharmacy (Preparation and Dispensing Errors - Registered Pharmacies) Order 2018

Paul Flynn Excerpts

Monday 4th December 2017 General Committees

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

This is a fascinating piece of legislation in that by far the greatest pressure on us in most areas of law is to make punishments more severe, but here we have an order that calls for an intelligent approach of drawing back from what appear to be excessively severe punishments for errors, mistakes, crimes or whatever they may be, in the knowledge that, human nature being what it is, there will be an atmosphere of more openness. That seems an entirely beneficial and persuasive argument and a good reason for putting the order forward.

We have clearly had a legacy of excessive and unreasonable punishments hanging over pharmacies, but that is not to say that all is well in the prescription of drugs in this country. In 2003, a COX-2 inhibitor drug called Vioxx was identified as a problem in America because the Food and Drug Administration there published a report saying it believed that the drug, which was not a life-saving one at all, had caused 120,000 heart attacks and strokes, many of which had led to death. I wrote to the regulatory body here asking why we did not spot that and how many prescriptions had been issued in 2003. I was told that there were 4,500 prescriptions, but there had been only half a dozen reports of bad reactions. We have errors and weaknesses in our system for spotting issues of that kind, and I believe that if we are doing something wise, generous and sensible as far as pharmacists are concerned, we might look to them to play a fuller part in future as the frontline in identifying bad reactions to drugs such as the COX-2 inhibitors. They can also help us to avoid the great scourge in America at the moment, which is now coming here: the misuse and overuse of opioid drugs. That has become a greater killer in America than traffic accidents or gun crime, and we are seeing an increase in deaths from opioid drugs and addiction to them here.

I believe we would all say that we welcome the order, but there is a great deal more to be done to protect the public from the dangers of prescribed drugs, and pharmacists could play a major role in that.