A House of Lords grand committee discussion on upcoming pharmacy supervision reforms has raised concerns about “large pharmacy corporations” putting patients at “risk” for “financial gain”.
Speaking in the Lords yesterday (October 21), Baroness Hollins said that there is “a worry that large pharmacy corporations could create pressure or targets that result in pharmacy technician supervision replacing pharmacist supervision for financial gain”.
This could “put patients at greater risk because of the knowledge gap between the pharmacist and the pharmacy technician”, she argued, claiming that pharmacists “obviously [have] much greater scientific and clinical knowledge”.
Read more: ‘Common-sense’: DH publishes draft supervision legislation
And Baroness Bennett raised similar concerns, stressing that “there is a risk of seeing one pharmacist having effective control and providing authorisation to a large number of pharmacy technicians” in “corporate or supermarket-owned pharmacies”.
This could be the case if “corporate structures” put a “large amount of pressure on financial returns rather than ensuring absolute safety”, she said.
The government must think about “the controls and where there is huge financial pressure on independence”, she added, highlighting that “a majority of prescriptions now come through giant corporate companies with very distant methods of control”.
“Overhaul” training first
Baroness Bennett also touched on the General Pharmaceutical Council’s (GPhC) consultation – launched earlier this month – on increasing pharmacy technicians’ education from level 3 to “at least” level 4 and reforming entry requirements to improve their “basic knowledge”.
The regulator has “just opened a consultation on changing the training, yet here we are bringing in regulations that almost seem to [assume that the] training has already been stepped up”, she said.
“Would it not be a better idea to step up and overhaul the training and then bring in the different regulations,” she argued.
Read more: ‘Many’ pharmacists against supervision reforms, DH admits
And she added that “the consultation suggests there is a very clear understanding that there is a need to improve the training of pharmacy technicians”.
It comes after the Department of Health and Social Care (DH) published the long-awaited plans to “modernise pharmacy supervision rules to allow registered pharmacy technicians to take greater responsibility and enable pharmacists to focus more on frontline patient care” in July.
Read more: Supervision reform proposals could pose ‘risk to patient safety’, DH admits
The DH said at the time that the draft legislation “is expected to come into effect by the end of 2025”.
But the government’s response to its consultation on the plans revealed that “many individual pharmacists” did not support the proposals while others “expressed cautious or conditional agreement”.
