EXCLUSIVE

The General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) may have to push back the implementation of its new premises standards for a further year, C+D has learned.

The GPhC could not fully implement its standards, which will allow it to publish its inspection reports of pharmacies, until the government has consulted on changes to the law, said GPhC chief executive Duncan Rudkin.

But the regulator did not have "a clear view" of whether this would happen before 2015, he told C+D in an exclusive interview last week (June 13).

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	The government's programme board set up to ‘rebalance' medicines legislation and pharmacy regulation had agreed some of the legislative amendments "in principle", but still needed to conduct a public consultation on the changes, he stressed.

"The legislative timetable isn't something we control. It can be slow and sometimes it can take some time to get right," Mr Rudkin said.

The consultation would assure the government that the changes would not "come as a surprise to anybody", he added.

The GPhC is currently inspecting pharmacies as part of the prototype phase of its premises standards but is not publishing the results of these visits.

The GPhC's proposed changes to its standards, which were originally intended to be implemented last October, would allow it to make its premises inspection ratings public and arm it with a "complete suite of regulatory tools", it told C+D.

Although the regulator was a member of the government's programme board, it would not know exactly what powers are proposed until the final draft of the consultation had been agreed, it said.

The Department of Health told C+D on Wednesday (June 18) that the consultation would take place "in due course", but no date had been agreed.

In March, the programme board said its consultation would include proposals for the GPhC to take over the power to decide if a responsible pharmacist needed to be on the premises at all times. The consultation had originally been scheduled for January, but board chair Ken Jarrold said at the time that the group was still "working hard to get [it] underway".

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