You already know that I spend most of my working day covering the backs of other NHS employees farther down the food chain, a situation summed up perfectly by the following joke: “How many nurses does it take to change a light bulb?” “None. Doctor’s been informed.”

It’s not only nurses who benefit from my role as safety net. I see well babies sent from the Well Baby Clinic by health visitors who aren’t sure whether the baby is well, I see sad lonely old ladies who have been assessed by psychiatric nurses as being “borderline depressed” in case someone’s invented “borderline Prozac”, and I see wounds that the district nurses think might be infected but want me to check as I can recognise individual strains of bacteria with the naked eye that are invisible to ordinary mortals.

But, quis custodiet ipsos custodies; who watches the back of the back-watcher (loosely translated)? A round of applause for my friendly neighbourhood pharmacist.

Not only can he calculate the exact number of tablets required to last six weeks should a patient take two a day — beyond my NHS computer in the hot weather — he can also intercept the comedy prescriptions that I issue from time to time.

Your GP, like any other, occasionally signs a computer- generated prescription for one gram of hydrocortisone cream instead of one tube. Cue phone call from pharmacist, lame joke at GP’s expense about treating a gerbil with eczema followed by sheepish issue of new corrected script.

Doctors so appreciate

the support of pharmacists that we turn a blind eye to their shop windows full of inadequate SPF4 sunscreens and shelves of homoeopathic antimalarials. We also

realise that pharmacists are shopkeepers who have families to feed, so we divert patients who would get better untreated to them for some “professional advice”, a service funded entirely by

the sale of antiviral creams

for cold sores, antibiotic ointments for eye infections and other products of negligible clinical benefit.

This cosy symbiosis, with patients passed from surgery to pharmacy by way of

the issue and filling of prescriptions, has served the NHS well since its inception— when pharmacists made

up cough linctuses on the premises and dispensed