Rob Darracott FRPharmS
RPS Fellow
“An expert, forward-thinking leadership organisation, committed to excellence, is what the profession needs and deserves at this stage in its history and development. So I wholeheartedly support the royal college proposal and I will be encouraging anybody that asks me to vote in favour.”
Why are you supporting the proposals set out by RPS?
I think there is a very powerful case to be made for a royal college of pharmacy. I want the RPS to inhabit the full extent of what it means to be a royal college.
What does it mean to be a royal college?
In the medical professions, royal colleges are where respected, understood, professional leadership sits. For me, royal colleges are first and foremost about professional excellence. Their DNA is excellence in the practice of their professions.
They are custodians of knowledge: the RPS has a great library, for example, and is the publisher of texts covering the science of medicines known all over the world.
Royal colleges set standards for practice ‘in practice’. This is different from what regulators do, which is set the base level for practice and check whether people are qualified to get in. The royal colleges are concerned with what’s going on in the real world. I also think that royal colleges should be visionaries for how the profession can continue to excel, deploying the deep knowledge they hold for the benefit of patients.
Why is RPS the right organisation to take this forward?
I think the leadership role of a royal college is the birthright of the RPS. If we look back to its very earliest foundations, it’s what the RPS was set up to do.
In 1841, the leading chemists of the day, first in London and then rapidly in the rest of the country, established the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, which was committed to the science of pharmacy and the education of its members. The school of pharmacy followed within a year, in 1842, to underpin the learning of its members. Their very first meetings were to consider scientific papers. They said to the public directly, we are committed to science, high quality and well-produced medicines, and therefore we set ourselves above others in the same trade who are not committed to these things. By the 1860s, because of their efforts, this difference, and the role of the profession, was enshrined in law, largely through the efforts of the leadership body.
What are your thoughts about the proposed governance changes?
A lot of the arguments in favour of the proposals are concerned with structure and governance. The proposals are quite technocratic, and they’re framed in terms of the importance of being able to respond to change. We clearly need to be able to do that. But for me, I think there’s a bigger role for the organisation, and that is to make change happen.
If we get this right, we will have a leadership body that’s rooted in the science of medicines, committed to excellence in practice, and committed to public benefit. Who better to make the case for change?
How do you think these changes would affect you?
It’s unlikely to affect me much because I’m too old! But I’d like to think if I was a pharmacist in my 20s or 30s I’d want to be a member of this organisation. Part of the role of the royal college is to bring together the people coming through with people who have a lifetime of experience to draw on. I look at people who have worked for 30-40 years, like some of the consultant pharmacists now, and they’ve had amazing careers and helped so many people. Things the RPS are doing now, like mentoring, are fundamental to using people’s expertise and experience to support younger people to be as good as they can possibly be.
What would your message be to other voters?
An expert, forward-thinking leadership organisation, committed to excellence, is what the profession needs and deserves at this stage in its history and development. So I wholeheartedly support the royal college proposal and I will be encouraging anybody that asks me to vote in favour.