The General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) fitness-to-practise (FtP) committee can issue a host of different sanctions to individuals, ranging from warnings to removals from its register, and C+D has carried out a deep dive to see how these have varied in recent years.
There has been a sharp rise in the overall number of sanctions issued since February 2022, with removals more than doubling by January this year, a C+D Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the regulator has revealed.
But is the regulator delivering harsher sanctions?
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Total sanctions rose by over 80% from 52 to 94 between February 1 2022 and January 31 2025, the GPhC exclusively revealed to C+D last month.
But the proportion of each FtP sanction category in that period remained broadly similar from 2022/23 to 2024/25, with a shift towards more suspensions in the middle year.
The number of suspensions more than doubled in the space of a year, rising from 12 in 2022/23 to 31 in 2023/24 - 23% and 39% of sanctions respectively – although this returned to 19 (20%) the following year.
And the data showed a steady rise in the number of removals issued to registrants across the three years, more than doubling from seven to 18.
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However, the proportion of removals relative to total sanctions rose much more modestly, representing 14% of sanctions in 2022/23 and 19% in 2024/25.
The number of registrants handed conditions went from two in 2022/23 to four in both 2023/24 and 2024/25, representing 4%, 5% and 4% of total sanctions respectively.
And warnings rose from six in 2022/23 to 13 in 2023/24 before dropping down to nine in 2024/25, which represented 12%, 16% and 10% of total sanctions respectively.
The sanction data also included warnings issued by the GPhC’s investigation committee (IC), which considers whether a registrant’s fitness to practise is impaired and either refers cases to the FtP committee or decides on “alternative outcomes”, according to the regulator.
From the raw data, IC warnings appeared to have significantly jumped from 25 in 2022/23 to 44 in 2024/25.
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But when looking at these as a proportion of total sanctions – 48% and 47% respectively – there is no significant change.
According to the GPhC, it has seen a 30% year-on-year increase in FtP referrals since 2022 and this is reflected in the overall number of sanctions.
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There has also been an increase in the number of cases reaching IC and FtP committee stages, it told C+D.
It comes after the pharmacy regulator last month told C+D that it will not continue with plans to “redact information that could identify the ethnicity of a registrant appearing before the investigating committee (IC)”.
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Among other reasons, it said that “the feedback received suggests that redacting registrant information has had a negative impact on the timely service of bundles and on the pace of conducting the meetings”.
And in February, the GPhC revealed that it had set aside an extra £300,000 for external legal advice to help tackle its chronic backlog of open investigation cases as FtP performance fell from amber to red.
