Viscount Hanworth
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(8 years, 2 months ago)
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Viscount Hanworth (Lab)
My Lords, I wish to speak in the gap.
Prescribing is one of the major roles and responsibilities of a doctor. It follows that a sound knowledge of pharmacology should be an important element in the training of all clinicians. We are now embarking on an era of medicine where treatments by drugs are becoming increasingly specific to individual patients. These developments and the application of such remedies is complex and demanding and it requires the oversight of experts.
Since the creation of the first academic departments of clinical pharmacology in the UK in the 1950s, the discipline has played a substantial role in studies in experimental medicine, and in large-scale clinical trials.
Concerns have been expressed in recent years that the number of clinical pharmacologists in the UK is falling; many of the individuals concerned are within 10 years of retirement, so there will be an even more critical shortage of clinical pharmacologists in the near future. The consequence of a dearth of specialist pharmacologists and a dearth of knowledge of pharmacology among the generality of clinicians is worrying.
Poor prescribing is one way in which patients can come to harm. A lack of knowledge can also make general practitioners vulnerable to the persuasions of drug companies that are intent on selling their remedies without regard to their efficacy or their dangers. It is difficult to estimate the cost to our health service of the inappropriate adoption of drugs that have been the subject of hard sales techniques, but it must be considerable.
What is lacking from our health service, and what it once possessed, is a facility for conducting exacting trials of pharmaceutical remedies. The decline in the number of specialist clinical pharmacologists in the health service and the marginalisation of pharmacology in medical training implies that there will be acute problems in the near future. These problems will be the legacy of a remarkable oversight on the part of the Department of Health and of the General Medical Council, over a period of more than 20 years. It is time for this situation to be amended.