Community pharmacy could be doing more to "safeguard" against prescribing errors with the sector only reporting one in 46,000 serious mistakes, a senior NHS England official has said.

NHS England received just 39 prescribing incident reports from community pharmacists in 2012 out of an estimated 1.8 million serious errors, revealed David Cousins, senior head of patient safety for safe medication practice and medical devices at NHS England.

Although some pharmacists did well in scrutinising prescriptions and acting as a "barrier" to prescribing errors and preventable harms, the sector could make a bigger impact, he told a North East London LPC event last week (April 22).

Pharmacist should better promote and document their role as a "safeguard" against GP prescribing errors, Dr Cousins said.

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	"I think that community pharmacy doesn't really promote its safety element. It's not well defined, it's not well documented, it's just assumed that it's going on and good things are happening," he said.

A study by the University of Nottingham, commissioned by the General Medical Council and published in 2012, found one in 20 prescriptions contained an error, and one in 550 contained a serious error.

That meant that 1.8 million out of the 1 billion prescriptions GPs write every year contain a serious error, Dr Cousins said.

Pharmacists need not report all errors to NHS England, but they should at least report "some of the incidents", he said.

"There's room for improvement, there's room for learning, both locally and nationally," he said.

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