GPhC to update standards for support staff
The regulator will decide whether it should continue to regulate counter and dispensing staff through their employers, says chief executive Duncan Rudkin
The General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) will revise its education and training requirements for non-registered support staff, it has announced.
Although the GPhC already assesses the training and supervision of counter and dispensing staff as part of its premises inspections, it had not undertaken a “formal review” of its standards for this workforce “in the last few years”, chief executive Duncan Rudkin said.
The regulator would decide whether to continue its approach of monitoring whether employers were upholding its standards for these staff, or to take on this responsibility itself, it told C+D on Monday (February 16).
The GPhC needed to “make sure we learn any lessons” from recent years, Mr Rudkin stressed. This would involve looking at how the public health role of non-registered staff had changed, as well as how patients were buying and using over-the-counter medicines, Mr Rudkin told C+D earlier this month (February 6).
The GPhC already has a policy on the minimum training requirements for dispensing and medicine counter assistants, but there was a “fundamental question” about what role employers, education providers and the GPhC should play in supervising this workforce, it said in papers released ahead of its council meeting on February 5.
“This includes assuring ourselves that patients are protected and pharmacies are employing teams with [an] appropriate mix of skills and qualifications,” it said.
The new standards would be aligned with a “comprehensive programme of work” to review education standards for pharmacists and technicians, it said. It would also consider whether to provide guidance for independent prescribers and whether to annotate the pharmaceutical register to include more information about registrants' qualifications and specialisms.
How should the GPhC monitor unregistered staff?
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