A little more than kin, and less than kind...

The BBC has decided to run a propaganda piece by the RPS (the body which is basically a trade union/ promotional society for pharmacists.  In the pay of Big Locket) where that noble body has convinced some twonk in dah gubmint that they can be doctors.  Sort of.  A bit.
Or at least play doctors.
Frankly I would be happier by far if they were simply proposing the widespread fondling of consenting patients on pleasure bent because what they are proposing is at best massively misguided and at worst disastrous.
I should point out that I spent 7 years teaching pharmacists at one of the oldest schools of pharmacy in the UK.  This experience has left me with several legacies amongst which are the habit of checking any prescription over myself before I sign for it, white hair, a new appreciation of what a completely closed shop can do for the rigour of a profession, the ability to get prescriptions quickly from locum pharmacists I once taught and absolutely zero respect for the abilities of the average pharmacist.
I say the average pharmacist because there are good ones who know a lot.  But I almost guarantee you will not meet them because they work for hospitals or drug companies, mainly the latter.
The people you meet...well lets be honest you probably don't meet them either.  Most dispensaries are so ill staffed that they employ dispensing assistants almost exclusively with an actual pharmacist simply ticking boxes to ensure minimum compliance with law.  This in itself is an accident waiting to happen.  My habits have saved me from several near fatal drug overdoses that I would not have caught had I not checked carefully. Of course this situation arose from market forces.  Let me take you through a bit of history.
The RPS and its predecessor the PSGB were a trade union that had aspirations towards being a learned society or royal college.  However a big problem there was that they were desperate that they maintain both the advocacy and registration roles.  Think about that, they wanted to be the pressure group AND the regulator.  Only in 2010 did they finally spit the dummy and let the regulation go.  So now they are simply a lobbying group.   Its like Greenpeace.  Or Friends Of The Support Stocking.
Anyhoo the society regulated and approved the university courses.  And set limits on how many students per year could be taught.  This was simply in order to keep wages high.  However the pharmacy corps got round this via dispensing assistants.....So now we have a glut of pharmacists.  Or as the article says, an army.
An army of pharmacists is about as effective as a platoon of peace-keeping koalas.
Here is the problem.  Pharmacists like to think they are health care professionals.  They are not.  They have the same relationship to health care professionals as those nameless characters who sit in the background of the Queen Vic do to Dot Cotton.  They have less of a role than Wellard.
The average pharmacist could be seamlessly replaced by a vending machine.  In fact if we went over to a vending machine and barcode system I suspect fewer mistakes would be made.  Far frm being healthcare workers they are simply people who run a corner shop and can count semi-accurately to 28.
The intake to pharmacy courses is made up almost universally of 1) heirs of corner shop pharmacists learning the family trade and 2) people who failed to get the grades for med school but want a steady job with good pay.  I don't have much argument with the latter to be fair as long as they do not put on airs.
My time in the Pharmacy School was spent almost completely insisting that the science content not be taken out.  The Guild of Apothecaries (RPS) seemed to regard the scientific bases for the treatments to be irrelevant and inconvenient.  Presumably because so many of them sell homeopathic products and other witchcraft.  They would also insist that since workers in their shops (most were working corner-shop pharmacists) would have no access to things like PPE students in our practicals should not wear goggles, and take no biohazard precautions on phlebotomy...
And these are the people who will save the NHS.
Dont get me wrong, a triage system would be a good idea.  But this is misguided nonsense promoted by the Guild of Apothecaries to dignify their frantic attempts to gain access to the medical profession, despite not having the grades to do so.