Pharmacy organisations and politicians have backed a government consultation on decriminalising dispensing errors.

 

Pharmacy Voice and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) both supported the launch last Thursday (February 12) of a Department of Health (DH) consultation on providing a defence from criminal prosecution for pharmacy staff who committed an inadvertent dispensing error while acting professionally.

 

Both organisations were represented on the programme board set up to “rebalance” medicines legislation, which developed the consultation, and Pharmacy Voice said the law on dispensing errors had required an update “for quite some time”.

 

“All pharmacists and managers should be encouraged to read the proposals and take part in the consultation where they can, ensuring the process is as effective as possible,” said Pharmacy Voice chief executive Rob Darracott.

 

RPS president Ash Soni said the consultation was an opportunity to “substantially” improve the number of errors reported by pharmacies. "The threat of criminal prosecution has weighed heavy on the profession for too long," he said.

 

Sir Kevin Barron MP, chair of the all-party pharmacy group (APPG), said the organisation had “tirelessly campaigned” for decriminalisation “both during this parliament and before”.

 

“We’ll study the consultation carefully and will be submitting our views to the government in due course. If the proposals meet our objective of removing the prospect of criminal proceedings against pharmacists who make an honest mistake, we shall be giving them our full support,” he said.

 

Pharmacists have until May 14 to respond to the consultation online. It is not yet known when the proposals - which also cover premses standards - will come into force. Although the new legislation was originally expected to come in last year, last month PSNC suggested it could take until 2016. 

Minimising delays

 

APPG vice-chair Oliver Colvile MP said he hoped the changes to the law would be made “swiftly”, but warned that the general election on May 7 meant the consultation would “straddle two parliaments”. “We are keen to minimise any delay this might cause,” he stressed.

 

The General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) welcomed the DH’s proposals, which would also allow the regulator to publish its premises inspection reports. The DH plan to remove the need for the GPhC to put its premises standards into legislative rules, and the regulator said this would enable it to implement a “new way of regulating pharmacies".

 

In its consultation, originally scheduled for January 2014, the DH said that a pharmacy professional or unregistered member of staff should have a defence against a criminal sanction for an inadvertent error if they met "strict conditions". These included showing they had acted “in the course of [their] profession”, had made a supply on the back of a prescription or patient group directive, and “promptly” informed the patient about the error once discovered, it said.