Gardaí to patrol temporary pharmacies

GARDAÍ will start patrolling the HSE’s temporary pharmacies from today amid allegations that protesting pharmacists were intimidating staff at the sites.

Up to 800 pharmacies withdrew from the state drug scheme on Saturday over the Government’s decision to slash the fees paid to pharmacists to operate the scheme.

In response, the HSE set up a number of temporary facilities to provide urgently required medicines to people whose local pharmacies were no longer dispensing.

However, within hours of the new facilities opening, the HSE said staff were being intimidated.

“I am absolutely appalled with what I have heard over the weekend,” Laverne McGuinness, the HSE’s national director for primary, continuing and community care, told RTÉ yesterday.

“We have had staff working very hard, working very long hours over the weekend and they have been intimidated by some of the professions, some of the pharmacists themselves.

“They have been seriously verbally abused and in some cases the gardaí have had to be called. That has happened in a number of our sites throughout the country including Roscommon and Stranorlor in Donegal.

“Gardaí will now have to have a presence and will be calling to those sites on Tuesday morning. The gardaí will be there in order to ensure the staff who are there to provide a service to the public continue to do so without any intimidation.”

Ms McGuinness also wrote to the registrar of the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland to make complaints about those involved.

However, Darragh O’Loughlin, vice-president of the Irish Pharmaceutical Union, said that while his union would never condone any acts of intimidation, it had received no concrete evidence that anything unsavoury had taken place.

“The key issue this morning is not necessarily allegations of misbehaviour by a small number of pharmacists but the key issue is the HSE’s contingency plans which they assured us and assured the public would take care of everybody’s medical card medication needs are clearly not working.

“We have had reports of extremely long delays at their clinics. We have had reports of patients waiting up to two hours only to be told that their medication is not actually in stock.”

The IPU also claimed that the pressure on the new clinics will get worse as the week goes on. The union also defended some of its members’ refusal to see new patients. The HSE said that the decision was not for the pharmacists to decide.

However, Mr O’Loughlin said: “New fitness-to-practice and disciplinary procedures were introduced by the minister last week… and pharmacists who are in a position where they believe their workload is high enough that they can just about work safely are exercising their professional judgement not to take on more work than they can do safely.

“Obviously no pharmacist wants to take on so much work that they end up struck off the register or sent to jail for an error they could have avoided. There are patient safety concerns.”