Boots pharmacy director 'looking forward' to supervision discussions
Boots is "looking forward" to discussing supervision of pharmacies in a "responsible way", the multiple's pharmacy director has told C+D.
Referring to C+D's extensive coverage of leaked Department of Health (DH) programme board proposals to hand legal responsibility for supervising medicine supplies to pharmacy technicians, Richard Bradley said Boots “has not yet been party” to these conversations.
However, having access to a pharmacist in Boots branches is “dead important” to patients, he said.
“We need our pharmacists to be able to spend even more time in conversation with those patients, whether it is medicines management, or discussions around services,” he told C+D in an exclusive interview at the Pharmacy Show earlier this month (October 8).
But the future of community pharmacy relies on developing a “skill mix” so “the whole team together can have the biggest impact”.
“We have over 1,000 fantastic [pharmacy] technicians,” Mr Bradley added. “My confidence in them and the role they do is huge.”
Mr Bradley acknowledged that the DH programme board overseeing the pharmacy supervision proposals "hasn't decided anything yet".
“We look forward to the whole profession having a discussion about what the future may look like for our teams,” Mr Bradley added.
Pharmacy supervision: what has been proposed?
A working group, established by the UK’s four chief pharmaceutical officers, suggested amending legislation to allow a pharmacy technician to, in a pharmacist’s absence, undertake the “supervision role” of determining when medicine supplies can go ahead.
It also proposed that pharmacy technicians could “oversee the activities of other, non-regulated, pharmacy staff”, according to the confidential documents seen by C+D.
Catch up on all of C+D's supervision coverage here.
What do you make of the supervision proposals?