Pharmacy minister Stephen Kinnock yesterday (May 6) announced that the response to the pharmacy supervision consultation – which was launched at the end of 2023 – will be published this year.
“The government is committed to publishing the response to the public consultation [on] pharmacy supervision and to bringing forward the associated legislation later this year,” he said.
Read more: UPDATED: DH launches long-awaited pharmacy supervision consultation
The comment came in a written response to a parliamentary question from Liberal Democrat MP for Epsom and Ewell Helen Maguire.
Maguire had asked the Department of Health and Social Care (DH) what the “timetable” is for the publication of its response to the consultation, which closed over a year ago in February 2024.
Read more: Supervision reform proposals could pose ‘risk to patient safety’, DH admits
The 12-week consultation on pharmacy supervision was announced by the DH on December 7 2023, proposing that pharmacists can “authorise pharmacy technicians to run a dispensary with reference to a pharmacist only where necessary”.
It followed calls from sector leaders to make supervision law “less inflexible” and allow pharmacy technicians to safely hand out the “majority of medicines”.
But the DH also admitted in December 2023 that the proposed changes to supervision rules “could increase the number of errors made” and pose a “risk to patient safety”.
“Significant shift”
The consultation proposed that:
- Pharmacists would be able to authorise registered pharmacy technicians to perform tasks that would otherwise need to be performed by or under the supervision of pharmacists
- Registered pharmacy technicians would be able to take primary responsibility for the preparation and assembly of medicinal products in highly specialised sterile manufacturing units in hospitals
- Checked and bagged prescribed medicines could be handed out in a retail pharmacy in the absence of a pharmacist – where authorised by one - so that patients could pick up their prescription when the pharmacist is at lunch or otherwise unavailable
Read more: Supervision proposals: ‘The greatest pharmacy evolution in 70 years’
The DH said at the time that these proposals would “maximise the contribution of pharmacy professionals” and make pharmacy services “fit for the future”.
It highlighted that “currently, the preparation, assembly, dispensing, sale and supply of pharmacy and prescription only medicines” (POMs) must be carried out “by or under the supervision of a pharmacist”.
Read more: Pharmacy supervision: The DH seems committed to changing the law; we must set the terms
Pharmacy technicians, however, are also “registered and regulated health professionals”, meaning they are “qualified to work without direct supervision”, it said.
And it added that the plans “would represent a significant shift” in dispensing and that the consultation empowers “over 67,000 pharmacists” in the UK “to have greater say in how staff are deployed and how medicines are dispensed”.
It stressed that the consultation was “not a move towards allowing pharmacists to remotely supervise a community pharmacy”.
