The General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) last week (April 24) told C+D that it will not continue with plans to “redact information that could identify the ethnicity of a registrant appearing before the investigating committee (IC)”.
The pharmacy regulator’s April council papers revealed that between April 2023 and March 2024 it ran an “anonymisation project”, aiming to “explore opportunities to mitigate potential bias in decision making”.
Read more: GPhC to start anonymising fitness-to-practise case papers from October
It said that over the period, the GPhC redacted the name, religion, country of birth and any other information that could “imply” the registrant’s ethnicity in 45 IC case bundles.
Explaining the “small” number, the papers said that multiple kinds of cases – including those involving allegations of discrimination, CCTV evidence and those with “excessive volumes of paperwork” – were excluded from the pilot.
“Confusing”
The GPhC said that 59% (10) of a small number of polled registrants reported that the anonymisation “made the process feel fairer”, while 40% (2) of committee members agreed.
But three of the five committee members also “reported that anonymised cases were harder to follow”, it added.
“A lack of familiarity slowed the consideration of anonymised cases,” one said.
Read more: GPhC: Non-white pharmacists ‘over-represented’ in FtP concerns
“Identifying the cases based on case numbers is confusing,” another complained.
One committee member reported that “redaction work for one meeting alone took over 18 hours,” the papers said, adding that staff “generally felt that the project had a disproportionate [impact] on their workload”.
“The feedback received suggests that redacting registrant information has had a negative impact on the timely service of bundles and on the pace of conducting the meetings,” they added.
“Difficult” to analyse
“As the numbers are so small, it has been difficult to qualify the analysis from the pilot,” the GPhC papers admitted.
But it said that the pilot did not indicate a “positive or negative impact on the potential for bias in IC decision making”.
“We therefore suggest [the evidence] is insufficient to justify the further resource commitment that would be required for a deeper and more meaningful exercise,” it added.
Read more: ‘Incredible waste of talent’: PDA slams GPhC for ‘failing’ black students
GPhC chief enforcement officer Dionne Spence said that the regulator sees “much more evidence of potential bias” from those raising complaints about registrants “rather than later on at the IC stage”.
She added that once the council has analysed more 2024/25 FtP data, “further work will be undertaken to consider how we can address the disparities identified at the earlier stage of the process when concerns are raised”.
“Failing” black students
In October 2023, the GPhC revealed that white pharmacists were still under-represented in the FtP concerns it received in 2021/22 – something it previously reported in 2018 and 2020.
Meanwhile in July, the Pharmacists’ Defence Association (PDA) said that the GPhC had “failed” black students in its response to a GPhC pharmacy education consultation.
“It is unclear what steps the GPhC has taken to independently assess any potential bias in its own registration exam nor what steps it has taken to support black African students,” it said at the time.
Read more: GPhC to hold ‘confidential’ discussions on racism, registration and FtP suicides
The PDA added that the persistent attainment gap between black students and other groups is “an incredible waste of talent and commitment when diligent students appear to be failed by a regulator that seems unable to ensure that individual universities provide better support”.
And in the same month, the GPhC revealed that it would discuss several agenda items as “confidential business” at its council meeting, including discussions on “racism in pharmacy”.
