General practitioner and the pharmacist.

The general practitioner and the community pharmacist are both major deliverers of health care and the services that they provide overlap.Both depend greatly on the activities of the other, and the effectiveness of each may be increased through appropriate cooperation between them, yet at the moment the two function almost entirely independently.Pharmacist's role as dispenser Pharmacists provide various services to promote health to the community, the most important of which is supplying medicine and appliances.Most of this service is in direct re- sponse to written directions from the general practitioner.Now that approximately 97'O of prescriptions are for ready manu- factured drugs the role of the pharmacist in dispensing is principally that of checking the accuracy and appropriateness of the prescription and confirming directions to patients.Of the 300 million National Health Service prescriptions written each year by doctors, it has been estimated that 18 million cause problems for the pharmacist because they are incorrect or incomplete, and six million of these need to be checked by the pharmacist with the doctor before the prescription can be dispensed.Together with the clinician, the pharmacist has a professional and legal responsibility in safeguarding the health of the patient, and whenever the instructions from the doctors are inaccurate, incomplete, or open to misinterpretation the pharmacist must seek clarification.This responsibility was recently underlined in the High Court, when as a result of an inappropriate prescription having been written and dispensed the pharmacist was required to pay 40°' of the very considerable damages of £100 000.Often, particularly in cities, the pharmacist and the local practitioner are not well known to each other and what com- munication exists is usually stimulated by a "problem prescrip- tion."It is often difficult to contact doctors and interruptions are generally unwelcome.So establishing communication for this purpose may cause irritation on both sides and every effort should be made by the clinician to reduce such occasions to the minimum by writing prescriptions legibly and checking dosages and frequency of administration when in doubt.