A locum pharmacist has been struck off the register for stealing more than £4,000-worth of a growth hormone from two Boots stores in East Sussex.
 
Trevor Barnes, registration number 2015957, stole 28 packs of Genotropin, which is used by body builders to gain muscle, from branches of Boots in Battle and Rye between January 2012 and April 2013, the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) heard at a fitness-to-practise hearing on February 19. Mr Barnes made £5,600 by selling these drugs to a customer for £200 per pack, the regulator estimated.
 
Mr Barnes - who did not attend  and was not represented at the hearing - had previously pointed out that he had eventually received prescriptions for the drugs, the GPhC heard. The regulator accepted that Mr Barnes had expressed “a degree of remorse” for his actions, but ruled that his conduct had struck against “the very heart of what pharmacists stand for in the community”.
 
Mr Barnes had been registered as a pharmacist for 42 years in January 2012 when he stole four packs of Genotropin - which Boots estimated was worth £146 per pack - from a branch in Battle where he was locuming as the responsible pharmacist. He sent the drugs to his customer by post without seeing a prescription or carrying out any clinical checks, the GPhC heard. 
 
He went on to sell the drugs in batches of six packs on four more separate occasions before his actions were discovered by Boots' loss prevention department. Despite not receiving a prescription for the first batch of the drug he sold, Mr Barnes continued to supply his customer without making any records of what he was doing or passing on the payments to his employer, the GPhC heard. Mr Barnes told Boots that on one occasion he smuggled the drugs out of the branch in his lunch box, the GPhC heard.

Supplementing his income

When asked why he had stolen the drugs, Mr Barnes said he wanted to supplement his income, because his pension “was not what he hoped it would be”, the GPhC heard.
 
Mr Barnes said it was his intention to put the supplies of the drug “through the books at Boots” and pay for what he had taken, but this had not happened before his actions were discovered. The GPhC did not accept that Mr Barnes ever intended to reimburse Boots and had been content to supply his customer "without seeing a single prescription".
 
Mr Barnes had agreed to pay £4,548 to Boots after the company asked for this sum. Having made £5,600 from selling the drugs, the regulator estimated Mr Barnes had still made a profit of £1,051.

The GPhC acknowledged that prescriptions for the drugs had been produced for police after Mr Barnes' activities had been discovered, but considered that there had been "a clear risk" that the drugs could have been misued.

It accepted there was no evidence any patients had come to harm as a result of Mr Barnes’ actions and he had remunerated Boots for the drugs he had stolen. Mr Barnes also described himself as “devastated” that he had allowed his “standards to drop” at the end of his career, in a letter he sent to the GPhC.

 But the regulator said Mr Barnes had treated the supply of an expensive drug as "his to deal with as he wanted". It stressed the severity of Mr Barnes’ actions were such that “no other conclusion” was possible than to remove him from the register.
 
Read the full determination here.
 
 

 

 

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