The College Ethics Guided Walk, May 2013

The College Ethics blog is delighted to have led the first College Ethics walk – to mark national walking month and the start of the Global Corporate Challenge. You can find out about our walk in the slideshow below, and there’s also a short audio clip about Doris Birdsall and some useful links. Thanks to everyone who took part.

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Listen to a recording of Sandra Vine-Jenkins and Jillian Mercer remembering Doris:

Other useful links:

• Find out more about Ethical Tissue on the College Ethics blog.
• Find out more about the Free City Bus on the College Ethics blog.
• Doris Birdsall: an obituary in the Guardian, and a profile on our 175 Heroes website.
• University of Bradford Ecoversity
• Green Solutions (College-owned recycling, re-using and storage business)

Ethical biscuits: palm oil

• UK sustainable palm oil targets are too weak, say retailers (The Guardian)
• The Rainforest Foundation report ‘Seeds of destruction’: palm oil developers threaten Africa’s rainforests
• Orangutangs and oil palm plantations: hanging on but just barely (World Wildlife Fund)

Thanks to:

• Our experts, Dr Susan Boyce, Ben Tongue, Ian Brown, Sandra Vine-Jenkins, Jillian Mercer, Neil Moore, Pam Sheldon
• Our Walking Champion, Jonathan Curtis

The walkers:

Susan Boyce – Ed Briggs – Zoe Corcoran – Jonathan Curtis – York Dixon – Joanne Fawthrop – Gail Hall – Gail Holmes – Emma Haycock – Susan Houlbrook – Vanessa Hutchison – Julia Kendall – Maria Mousawi – Linda Taglione – Ben Tongue – Sandra Vine-Jenkins – Fran Walker – Andy Welsh – Ruth Wilson

Text by Ruth Wilson, images by Ruth Wilson and Jonathan Curtis, Bradford College

Learning about ethics in pharmacy: from religious principles to massive robots

Victoria Wilkinson is a pharmacy technician who now teaches at Bradford College.

“In your average pharmacy, there are more technicians and assistants than pharmacists, and those are the groups we train here at the College” Victoria explains.

“Once this was a predominantly female profession, but there are growing numbers of men coming in, and we get people of all ages, from 16 to in their 50s. It’s a great career because there are so many areas you can work in: aseptics, which involves sterile environments; radiopharmacy, where you work with the radioactive pharmaceuticals
used in nuclear medicine; stores; purchasing and clinical trials to name a few. There are good jobs in NHS hospitals, but there’s also the army, teaching and pharmaceutical companies, so it’s an important and varied specialism.”

Victoria Wilkinson. Pharmacuetical Science Tutor, Bradford College

Victoria and I talked about the ethical issues that pharmacy technicians have to address:

“All technicians have a code of ethics set by the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC). For the last two years, membership has been mandatory, and there is a student code of conduct which students refer to when in training. For us, the patient comes first and that’s something we always emphasise. The findings of the inquiry into Stafford Hospital have made headline news, and it reinforces the importance of ethics for all healthcare staff.”

Another area is personal ethics. “There are some people who will not dispense the emergency morning after pill because of religious principles. We encourage open, tolerant and respectful discussion on sensitive topics like this. It is in fact legal for a pharmacist to refuse to dispense the pill, but they have to register this in advance with the GPhC and they have to advise the patient of other places where they can get the contraceptive.”

Another area students can feel strongly about is branded and generic drugs, where pharmaceutical companies charge a lot for patented and protected drugs for a 12 year period from the date they are released onto the market. “It’s the companies’ way of recouping their investment in research and development,” Victoria explains. “But there is a downside – cost. And for instance there is not enough research into areas such as antibiotics, possibly because that is not an attractive commercial option for the big companies.”

Victoria also teaches relevant areas of the law to College pharmacy students, and she recites a long list of legislation that is relevant. I ask whether a pharmacy technician might spot something like inappropriate or corrupt prescribing. “It is the job of the pharmacist to clinically check prescriptions so they may be more likely to identify something, but a technician could also spot something like this.”

Other areas for discussion are human error and how to minimise it, health and safety issues and data protection. “Working in a hospital or pharmacy you might well see the prescription of someone you know, or bump into someone out and about who you’ve seen as a patient,” says Victoria. “You have to manage those situations professionally.”

We talk briefly about the introduction of massive dispensing robots into hospital pharmacies. “You enter the prescription and the robot finds and packages the medication,” Victoria explains. “If the programming is right and the drugs are in the right place, it makes things safer. So humans still have to get everything right.” Does it lead to loss of jobs? “No, I think it gives the pharmacy staff more time to be with patients, which is what matters most.”

Victoria got her first job at the age of 16 at Bradford Royal Infirmary, and trained one day a week here at the College. She then became a full-time arts student at Bradford College, eventually doing a degree in fashion design. “I went back into pharmacy  as a locum technician, working anywhere in the country, just to make money while I waited for a fashion job,” Victoria explains. “But I got placed in Quality Control and suddenly something clicked and I fell in love with the job.”

Victoria has many years practical experience working in the NHS. While hospital-based, she gradually built up teaching skills, and in 2011 she jumped at the chance to work at Bradford College, where she helps provide training to our student pharmacy technicians.

The award-winning Bradford College Vocational Science Team (Victoria is in the back row).

Victoria’s team is celebrating right now: they have won several awards including most recently Partnership of the Year for the work with City Training Services and the Pharmacy Development Unit (University of Leeds) in the NHS Yorkshire and the Humber 2013 Apprenticeship Awards for National Apprenticeship Week.

They were also highly commended for the Provider of the Year category for these awards. Last year they won the College Team of the Year award. Two of their students are nominated as Rising Stars 2013 in the Further Education Awards, and  the team has been shortlisted for the Cogent UK Life Sciences Skills Award for Provider of the Year – to be announced by Science Minister the Rt Hon David Willetts.

So pharmacy at Bradford College is going strong – and lots of fingers are crossed for forthcoming awards!
Find out about Bradford College’s pharmacy courses.

photos and text by ruth wilson, bradford college

Can a College try to prevent corporate greed and hubris through the teaching of ethics?

“All the teaching of social responsibility and ethics in the U.S. and the rest of the developed world’s business schools has not prevented corporate greed and hubris from occurring and recurring.”

I have been reading a very interesting article by my colleague, Dr Khosro Jahdi*. Titled Education and Corporate Social Responsibility: the Bradford College Experience**, it looks at the how, why, what and ‘so what?’ of teaching ethics as part of business and marketing courses in higher education.

That question – has teaching ethics failed? – made me pause. How can we tell how successful business schools are at instilling ethics?

Are we able to compare the greed and corruption shown by business leaders who went to schools where ethics was taught as an explicit part of the curriculum, with those who did not?

Do we have all the facts? The high profile cases of corruption that we see are so outstanding that probably we do not give due weight to the thousands or millions of businesses that go about their business legally.

When we look for inspiring examples of corporate social responsibility, we see perhaps the most famous ones. But there must be many more modest enterprises where integrity and social commitment are shown, but no trumpets are blown.

Then again, we only know of the fraud and corruption that comes to light. How many businesses get away with cooking the books, or polluting the environment, exploiting their workforce or selling shoddy goods?

These are variants of survivor bias, ‘the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that “survived” some process and inadvertently overlooking those that didn’t because of their lack of visibility’. The big, negative events appear to dominate the corporate landscape, and we don’t know the true balance of corruption and virtue in business (in this instance, the focus on corruption might more accurately be termed ‘failure’ bias!).

Would perhaps the amount of corporate greed and hubris have been higher had ethics not been taught? It is a world of shifting mirrors – the most wealthy companies can potentially do considerable good. They can also spend more money telling you about it – or perhaps they are making themselves appear more socially committed than they are in reality, or even hiding the unacceptable side of capitalism.  I suspect that, sadly, scrutiny and sanctions in the real world are weak and insufficient, and that corporate greed may best be countered through the law.

In his search for answers, Khosro turns to his students and asks them what they think, and he draws on his own experience of more than 25 years teaching ethics. Fortunately, ethics is alive and well at Bradford College, and our students show a real urge to think about the issues, to the point that the Bradford Business School now runs a popular Masters module in International CSR and several of the academic staff have a strong interest in the area. While some of the analysts that Khosro quotes are concerned for the future of business ethics, his students seem to think that more and more people will expect companies to be ethical, and that students will want to learn about this.

I think I’m with the students on this one: it’s vital that all of us, and especially young people about to embark on their working lives, have the chance to learn about and reflect on business ethics. Where else and where better to do this than while you are at College?

* Khosro’s essay will be published by Emerald in ’Developments in Corporate Governance and Responsibilty, Vol. 4 Education and Corporate Social Responsibility: International Perspectives”.

** The photo is of Khosro – see also page 11 of our latest research bulletin.