Letter: IP qualified or not?

I was puzzled to read a comment made in the Workplace supplement for October.

In replying to ‘Who should consider taking them?’ with reference to IP qualifications the current College president Dr Mary-Ann Sherratt states that ‘an IP qualification allows you to prescribe, but you will need to be able to treat disease in your chosen area, so you need another appropriate higher qualification to do this’. This is a very unfortunate turn of phrase.

While it is true of the autonomous management of primary open angle glaucoma (despite over a third of the questions in the IP Common Final Assessment being on glaucoma) it is both illogical and untrue for other conditions.