The number of codes pharmacists have to deal with when a medicine is unavailable is being drastically cut to remove an "extra hurdle" for the profession, the British Association of Pharmaceutical Wholesalers (BAPW) has announced.

Wholesalers had worked with software providers and pharmacy bodies to reduce the number of patient medication record (PMR) codes sent to pharmacists from around 40 to just six, BAPW chief executive Martin Sawer told the Sigma Conference in Mexico on Tuesday (February 18).

The revised system should be in place next year and would cut the amount of time wasted by pharmacists when they tried to find out the reason for a medicine shortage, Mr Sawer said.

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	"We could see that the plethora of codes meaning different things depending on which wholesaler sent them was a real bugbear and an extra hurdle for pharmacists," he told C+D after his presentation to the conference.

The BAPW had sought advice from PSNC and the NPA over what information the codes should contain to explain the reasons for a shortage, and the new system had been "embraced" by the government's supply chain forum, Mr Sawer said.

The codes were waiting for approval by manufacturers and the BAPW was looking into ways of linking the codes to an email system to update pharmacists on alternative sources of the medicine and how long it would take to receive it, he said.

These codes could then be used across primary and secondary care, including by dispensing doctors, he added.

Aniruddh Patel, contractor at Savages Pharmacy in Burnham on Crouch, Essex said sorting through the different codes was a "headache" for pharmacists and he welcomed the BAPW's decision to simplify the system.

"It may only be a minute, but you're [scrolling through different codes] 10 times a day, 50 times a week. Streamlining processes like these different codes is all for the better," he told C+D.