The GPhC has vowed to continue making improvements after a report ticked it off for tardiness.
The regulator met 17 of the required 18 standards in its annual Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care (PSA) report, which covers from July 1, 2024, to June 30, 2025.
It did not meet Standard 15, which the PSA says relates to “timeliness of fitness to practise investigations”.
“The GPhC continues to demonstrate a strong commitment to tackling areas of underperformance and drive improvement,” said the PSA.
“It has met 17 out of 18 Standards this year and we do not have significant concerns about any other aspect of its regulatory performance.”
However, the PSA also said the GPhC “still takes too long to resolve fitness to practise cases and therefore has not met our standard relating to the quality and timeliness of investigations.”
It said though this is “one Standard out of 18, it does represent a critical part of the work of the GPhC in protecting the public.”
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The PSA said delays to fitness to practise cases have “negative impacts on registrants, complainants and witnesses and present a risk to public confidence”.
It said the GPhC has not met Standard 15 for fitness to practise timeliness since 2018/19.
It did note the “continued commitment” to improving the process and said the GPhC had reduced the “number of open older cases (over 52 weeks) from 422 to 305 during the course of this year.”
But it said it had written a letter “regarding our concerns to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and Health and Social Care Committee Chair.”
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In response to the report, Dionne Spence, chief enforcement officer at the GPhC, said the regulator was undergoing a “comprehensive improvement programme” to “fast-track the progression and resolution of our older cases” and to “improve the efficiency of how we manage our investigations and hearings.”
She said she was “pleased that the PSA’s report notes the efforts we have made to reduce our caseload, and particularly the proportion of investigations that have been open the longest.”
And she pointed to the “higher than usual number of fitness to practise referrals. We’ve seen a further 13% increase in referrals this year, and an overall increase of over 100% since 2022. We have had to divert our limited resources to deal with this increase, which has made it even more challenging to reduce our backlog of cases.”
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She also said the GPhC was “continuing to make continued and sustained improvements”. In particular, she said the “median time taken to reach an initial assessment decision has reduced from 5.7 weeks to 3.9 weeks in 2024-2025”
Also in response, GPhC CEO Duncan Rudkin said the regulator was “working hard to make investigations more streamlined and proportionate, so we are able to meet all of the PSA’s Standards of Good Regulation.”
“We have seen real improvements in productivity and timeliness for dealing with fitness to practise investigations,” he added.
“The GPhC is working hard to make these improvements as quickly as possible”.
