The circular from your professional body: pulling out what you have to do, and by when

Reading time: about 11 minutes

Summarising is one of the things a model does best, and a circular is a good candidate: lots of text, little substance, and the substance is very specific. But you do not summarise a circular to understand it: you summarise it to act. That changes what you need to ask for. An elegant summary explaining the spirit of the rule is no use to you; what helps is a list of what has to be done, by whom, before what date, and in which cases not. And that is where the risk lies: exceptions are exactly what a summary tends to drop.

Step by step

1. Ask for a list of actions, not a summary

   The difference between "summarise this" and "tell me what I have to do" is huge. The first produces a text that looks like the circular but shorter. The second forces the model to look for verbs, deadlines and people responsible, which is what you need on Monday.

   I am pasting a circular from the College of Pharmacists of my province.
   I am the owner / employed pharmacist of a community pharmacy.
   
   I do not want a summary. I want a TABLE with one row for each thing a
   pharmacy has to DO according to this circular, with these columns:
   - What has to be done (verb + object, one line).
   - By what date (exactly as it appears; if there is no date, write "no date").
   - Who it applies to (all pharmacies, only some… and which).
   - Page or section where it says so.
   
   Under the table, a section called EXCEPTIONS AND CONDITIONS with every
   "notwithstanding", "unless", "except" or "provided that" in the text,
   copied WORD FOR WORD.
   
   If anything in the text is unclear, say so; do not interpret it.
   
   Circular:
   paste the text here

   The two columns that matter most are the date and the page. The date, because that is what gets forgotten. The page, because it lets you check each row in ten seconds.

2. Check every date against the text

   Dates are where a summary goes wrong most often, and in very specific ways. First: it confuses the date of the circular, the date it comes into force and the deadline, which often all appear on the first page. Second: it turns a relative deadline ("within one month of publication") into an absolute date, and calculates it wrongly or from a different starting point. Third: it misses a date that appears in a footnote or an annex.

   That is why the page column exists. With the table in front of you, go row by row to the section cited and confirm the date is what it says. It takes five minutes for a normal circular, and it is exactly the part that cannot be delegated.

   If a deadline is relative, work it out yourself with the calendar. A model can add days, but it does not know on what day the resolution the deadline runs from was actually published, nor whether working days or calendar days count if the circular does not say clearly.

3. Read the exceptions before the table

   This step looks back to front, and it is on purpose. The table tells you what everyone does; the exceptions tell you whether you are "everyone". A rural pharmacy, one with an associated satellite dispensary, one that does not do on-call duty, one that already had an earlier system: many circulars treat them differently, and they say so in a "notwithstanding" in the second-to-last paragraph.

   If the exceptions section comes out empty and the circular was more than two pages long, be suspicious: the most likely explanation is that it did not copy them, not that there are none. Search the text yourself for "except", "unless", "notwithstanding" and "provided that" with the PDF search box. It takes a minute.

   If an exception applies to you, rewrite the corresponding row of the table for your case. The final table is your pharmacy’s, not the circular’s.

4. Turn the table into tasks with an owner

   With the rows checked, each one becomes a team task with a name and a date, noted wherever you note things: the pharmacy calendar, the back-room whiteboard, the team group chat. AI can help you word the notice, but not decide who does what.

   Using this task table, which has already been checked, write a short
   notice for the pharmacy team (no more than 10 lines) saying what is
   changing, what each person has to do and by what date. Direct tone,
   no jargon. Do not add anything that is not in the table.
   
   Table:
   paste your table with the people responsible already filled in

   The last line stops the notice "improving" the information with context that was not there: justifications, consequences, legal references that sound right and nobody has checked.

5. Keep the circular next to the table

   In three months someone will ask where one of those tasks came from. If the answer is "the AI said so", you are in trouble; if it is "section 3 of the circular dated such-and-such", you are not. Keep the original circular and the table in the same folder, with the date in the file name.

   And if the professional body later publishes a clarification or a correction — which happens often with regulatory changes — repeat the process with just the clarification and compare the two tables. Whatever changes is what needs to go back to the team.

   The same method works for any document that requires you to do something: a resolution from the regional health department, instructions from a manufacturer about a batch recall, the new terms of your insurance. The question is never "what is this about?", but "what do I have to do and by when?".

A full example, and what is wrong with it

This is what a model replied to a circular about a change in how an activity is recorded, when it was simply asked to "summarise this circular". The original was eight pages long. It is shortened.

And now, what is wrong with that reply:

1. The date is not what it seems. In the circular, 30 October is the date from which the platform becomes available; the deadline for registering is two months after that. The summary has merged the two and turned the opening into the closing. Anyone who trusts it will rush for nothing — or worse, will read the next circular properly and trust all of them less.
2. The exception has vanished. The circular had a "notwithstanding" on page 6: pharmacies with a linked satellite dispensary could keep paper records for the satellite for a transitional period. In the summary, "all community pharmacies" and "will no longer be accepted" close that off completely. If you have a satellite, that is exactly what applied to you.
3. It says what it is about, not what has to be done. "Pharmacies are advised to review their internal procedures" is a sentence nobody can carry out. The circular asked for three specific actions — register, appoint someone responsible, and keep the current year’s paper records — and the summary names only one.
4. And there is not a single page reference, so to check any of these three things you have to reread all eight pages, which is what the summary was supposed to save you.

A reply that is right in tone and wrong on the only things that mattered: the date, the exception and the actions. It is the typical result of asking for a summary of something you have to comply with.

With the prompt from step 1, the same circular came out as a three-row table, each row with its page, and an exceptions section with the satellite paragraph copied word for word. The date was still misread in the first row — opening instead of deadline — but with the page next to it, that showed up in thirty seconds.

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