PD Editorial: Patient safety is key in fallout of pharmacy cheating scandal

The fallout from cheating on the state pharmacist licensing exam is massive and devastating for those who took the test honestly. Their plight, however, is unavoidable in light of the revelation that more than 100 questions from the licensing exam were leaked online. Patient safety must remain paramount.

The state Board of Pharmacy decided to invalidate the test scores of all 1,400 pharmacists who took the test since July. That means many new pharmacists who had lined up jobs and who need to start paying off student loans suddenly can't work in their profession. They will be able to retake the test in November with the $30 fee waived.

“We are fully aware of how destructive it's been for them, but we're a consumer protection agency,” said board spokesman Bob Davila. “We want to make sure that anyone who does get a license in California is in fact competent to take care of California patients.”

Some pharmacists have threatened lawsuits, planned protests and worked to get the state board to reverse its decision. They're gaining some traction in the halls of power. Assemblyman Jim Patterson, R-Fresno, criticized the decision. “They're throwing thousands of people under the bus who played by the rules - they didn't cheat and yet they're being treated as if they did,” he said.

The frustration of those who did nothing wrong but are being punished for the actions of others is completely understandable. But the board did what it needed to do. Without a means of differentiating the cheaters from the honest test-takers, there's no viable alternative.

The villains in this are the cheaters: whoever decided to leak the answers to the questions and the test-takers who made use of those answers. Maybe all of the cheaters would like to come forward and have that stain on their record … We didn't think so.

Jon Roth, who heads the California Pharmacists Association, said he doubted there was a great conspiracy behind the cheating. “I don't see this mass underground of cheating pharmacy students on the state exam,” he said, noting that pharmacists are “very cautious, very conservative in their approach to life and their profession, and they take it very seriously.”

That being the case, pharmacists across the state should understand why the board made its decision - a cautious, conservative plan to ensure that every pharmacist who passed the board exam did so without advance access to the answers to the exam's questions.

Consider the alternative. Imagine if one of the cheaters landed a job without having really mastered the material. A compounding or dosing mistake could have catastrophic consequences for a patient. If a Californian died because the state Board of Pharmacy hadn't responded to the cheating as it has, there would be justified public outrage.

This is a bad situation. The fault doesn't lie with either test-takers who didn't cheat or with the state board doing what it must to ensure the integrity of the licensing process and the competence of those practicing pharmacology in the state of California. Those who cheated are the ones to blame. With any luck, when they retake the test, it will become clear which ones they were.

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