Trinity College Dublin may lose accreditation to run a school of pharmacy, unless it accedes to demands by the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland, writes Kathryn Holmquist.
While this year's intake of 70 pharmacy students will be able to get their qualifications, the PSI has expressed strong reservations about approving TCD's course for a further year and into the future.
The PSI claims that Trinity is not investing in the staffing and development required if the course is to remain viable. The society has issued a damning report on the standards at the school of pharmacy. The university will meet representatives of the PSI next week to discuss the crisis. University sources say that budget constraints are the key to the problem.
However, TCD has told The Irish Times that it is in control of the situation and that action will be taken soon on the staffing shortage.
TCD's pharmacy school opened in the late 1970s, and the CAO points required for entry are nearly as high as those needed for medicine. It has 280 students.
The Pharmaceutical Society is also concerned that there are too many pharmacists coming on to the employment market. It believes that two recently accredited courses at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and University College Cork may be enough to meet market demand, and the TCD course could lead to an oversupply of pharmacists.
The numbers qualifying annually in the Republic have jumped from 70 to 170, following the accreditation of UCC earlier this year and the RCSI the year before.
The Pharmaceutical Society issued a "negative" report on TCD's school of pharmacy last May. Staffing in its department of pharmacology (one of four departments in the school of pharmacy) has been reduced from four to two, following the death of one staff member and the retirement of another.
The society is worried that TCD pharmacy students are not getting the on-site, practical experience required. It has also complained to TCD that the department of pharmaceutics is one lecturer short and there is no full-time director of the school of pharmacy. TCD has confirmed the dean of science is the acting head of the school.
But the society regards this as "unacceptable" because the dean is not a pharmacist.
New EU regulations, which come into effect next May, will allow pharmacists trained outside the Republic to set up businesses here. Pharmacy is such a popular course that many Irish students are qualifying in Britain. As a result, 38 per cent of newly employed pharmacists in the Republic have qualified outside the State.
The Pharmaceutical Society believes that, while there is full employment of newly qualified pharmacists at present, this situation could deteriorate quickly as a result of EU deregulation and the large number of Irish pharmacists qualifying in Britain.
Pharmacy is seen as a lucrative profession. Changing lifestyles have required pharmacies to open for longer hours - increasing the need for pharmacists. And even though the number of pharmacists qualifying every year has more than tripled, the points required to study pharmacy have not dropped.
The society is also critical of the current trend whereby pharmacies are becoming shampoo boutiques, where the focus is on cosmetics rather than chemistry. It is easier to set up a pharmacy in the Republic than anywhere else in the EU due to a lack of regulation, the society claims. It has also warned that the standard of patient care in pharmacies could drop unless the Department of Health carefully monitors training. Otherwise, it predicts a glut of poor-standard pharmacies in the next decade.