Mixed reviews about The Pharmaceutical Journal

I have read The Pharmaceutical Journal since the days of my pharmacy apprenticeship. I have always valued my receipt of it
, have always found items of interest and value in it, and I continue to do so to this day. In addition, even though I go online to the website three or four times a week, I still find fresh items of interest or value when I receive the print edition.

Given the variety of roles individual pharmacists undertake — including those in areas of primary and secondary healthcare, industry, research and academia — there will always be a need for individual pharmacists to use other journals and sources of information. In my own case this included a variety of medical, scientific and educational journals.

In recent years, my major disappointment with The Pharmaceutical Journal has been the absence of reports of the discussions within the national pharmacy boards and the Assembly. In the past few months articles in the Your RPS section have begun to address this key area but these reports fall well short of the reporting of council meetings that were published within The Pharmaceutical Journal in earlier days.

Surely a key role of our journal must be to keep members well informed of the activities and decisions taken by the national pharmacy boards and the Assembly and of the discussions leading up to those decisions? I am certain that other members share my disappointment.

Fewer may share my other current disappointment: that of the use of stand-alone surnames in articles and reports which I do not recollect being the case in earlier years. For example, in the recent report of the English Pharmacy Board meeting on 26 January 2017, there were a number of presenters all initially identified by their first name and surname who were subsequently identified only by their surname. To me it would have been far more appropriate to have used their designation of, say, ‘Mr’ or ‘Ms’ before the surname or to have used their first name. We would then have had, for example, Mr Farrar or Keith instead of Farrar in the later parts of the report.

Douglas Hancox

Auckland, New Zealand