PHARMACIST’S PLACE

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 337, 19 January 1937, Page 3

PHARMACIST’S PLACE

In Comprehensive National Health Scheme. “The pharmacist must play an important part in any comprehensive national health scheme,” said Mr W. K. Hounsell, manager of the Auckland Friendly Societies’ Friendly Dispensary in a paper read ‘before the pharmaceutical science section ■of the Science Congress. No healtli scheme, he said, could function unless it undertook to educate the public in matters of housing, working conditions, personal hygiene, and correct diet. Such a scheme, he added, should try to attack disease* by early domiciliary treatment in the family group by the .general practitioner, resorting to the specialist and other service's when necessary. It was obvious that the pharmacist, by supplying medicines, to the patients of those general practitioners, must occupy a prominent place in,any health scheme. As the Department of Health for Scotland had pointed out. the use of drugs otherwise than under skilled direction did not as a rule constitute treatment. Since self-medication was | widely practised- in Ausaralia and I New Zealand, it was urgently necessary, for both the education and well-being of the public, that the sale < of all medicines should be confined to those specially trained to handle them. The question regarding the education of the public was whether the pharmacist was ready to accept tho I responsibility? It was the duty ■ofj pharmacists, Mr Hounsell added, as professional men, to make sickness insurance successful in its ultimate aim.