The General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) has pledged to make its premises inspections shorter, give pharmacies more time to respond to their reports and offer more advice on how to improve upon a ‘satisfactory' rating.

After gathering feedback from 2,000 UK inspections, the GPhC will give superintendents and owners five days to feed back on the reports – unless the pharmacy is rated ‘poor', in which case the timeframe will remain two days.

It will also "streamline" inspections to make them shorter and give ‘satisfactory' pharmacies advice on how to achieve a good rating, the regulator revealed at a meeting on its inspection model held at the Royal College of General Practitioners in London yesterday (October 23).

The prototype inspection model has been running for a year and the GPhC said feedback had generally been "very positive", with many saying the new regime had helped them think about how to improve their services.

But there were a "number of key things" that pharmacies had raised as concerns, revealed Mark Voce, head of inspections at the GPhC. They felt there was "insufficient" time to respond to the report, he said, and pharmacists had reported lengthy inspections – with some visits taking up to seven hours.

Mr Voce pledged that inspectors would now concentrate on working "in the most efficient way possible" and avoid gathering too much information. "There are certain things that don't require lengthy conversations," he stressed. "If a pharmacy's clean, it's clean."

Mr Voce said pharmacies rated ‘satisfactory' had also raised concerns that they were not given any feedback on how to improve. The GPhC would ensure to give all pharmacies with this rating explicit evidence on how it could do better in future, he pledged.

The GPhC will also publish more case studies of pharmacies rated as ‘good' and set out further principles for its definition of ‘excellent', following concerns over a lack of clarity in the criteria. These principles include optimising patients' use of medicines, working in partnership with other healthcare providers and "continually learning and researching good practice".

GPhC chief executive Duncan Rudkin said the regulator remained "fully committed" to listening and would continue to develop the model in line with feedback. The GPhC will hold a formal consultation "at a later stage", although there is no set date as yet, as well as stakeholder meetings to gather views on the inspection regime.

	Has the GPhC done enough to respond to feedback on premises inspections?