Pharmacist Edwin Joseph Nally, registration number 2074553, has received a six-week suspension for failing to report two driving- related convictions to the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) “within seven days or at all”.
In a remote hearing on April 1 and 2, the GPhC’s FtP committee heard that he was convicted at North Yorkshire Magistrates’ Court in January 2024 for failing to “provide information relating to the identification of the driver” of a car at a traffic bureau in June 2023.
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According to the hearing documents, Nally was then convicted again at York Magistrates’ Court in January 2025 for driving on a road while “disqualified from holding or obtaining a driving licence”.
The regulator accepted that “no members of the public were put at risk of harm” by Nally’s actions.
But it stressed that he “failed to notify the council” of these motoring offences in “good time”.
“Lackadaisical approach”
Nally was working as a pharmacist in June 2023 when he “failed to provide information relating to the identification of the driver of a Volkswagen Golf” at a traffic bureau, resulting in a conviction seven months later in January 2024, the GPhC said.
It added that as part of the conviction, the magistrate “imposed a 12-month disqualification” and added six points to his licence.
Nally was then stopped by the police in July 2024 and “informed that he was driving while disqualified”, the committee heard.
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The matter was prosecuted and Nally was convicted in January 2025, with the court imposing a “three-month disqualification from driving”.
But he “failed to declare” these convictions to the GPhC “within seven days or at all”, the regulator said.
The committee accepted Nally’s argument that “he did not remember about the seven-day rule” and found that it was “more likely than not that [he] did not know about that conviction or his disqualification until he was stopped by the police six months later”.
But it noted that he had “full confirmation of both convictions” and that it was the GPhC who contacted him after they were informed by the police.
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It also said that while ordinarily it “might have found” not informing the council of the convictions “did not amount to misconduct”, it was aware he had gone through a FtP process in 2013 “regarding multiple convictions for motoring offences and failing to report” them to the GPhC.
He was given a warning at the time, which should have made him “more vigilant about his professional obligation to report any convictions”, the committee argued.
It added that while Nally “did not intend to conceal” the most recent convictions from the council, his “lackadaisical approach to reporting them would have appalled fellow practitioners and attracted moral opprobrium, especially after he had been given a warning several years before for precisely the same issue”.
Profession brought into “disrepute”
According to the hearing document, Nally told the committee that he accepted his actions “brought the profession into disrepute” and that he “needed to be more intentional and less careless”.
He said that he understood his “lack of action meant that he had not kept to the high standards that were expected of him as a professional”.
And he added that he “could not argue that a sanction was required to uphold professional standards and to maintain public confidence in the profession”, acknowledging that a warning “would not be appropriate”.
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The regulator accepted that the matters being discussed in this case “did not involve any aspect of pharmacy practice” and that there was no evidence to suggest that “any member of the public had been put at risk of harm” by Nally’s actions.
It acknowledged that his convictions did not breach “any fundamental principles of the profession, nor do they demonstrate a lack of integrity on the part of” Nally.
But it stressed that this was “the second time” Nally had “failed to notify the council of motoring offences in good time”.
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And it noted that a “short period of suspension was the appropriate and proportionate outcome” in this case.
The GPhC concluded that Nally should be suspended from the register for “a period of six weeks”.
Read the determination in full here.
