The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 268 No 7190 p411-415
23 March 2002

Society summary

Society's website offers live checks of registers of pharmacists and premises

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society's website now offers live access to the Register of Pharmaceutical Chemists and the Register of Premises. The new service has been launched in response to requests from members, employers, pharmaceutical suppliers and employment and locum agencies.

Unlimited checks of members and premises can be made free of charge by accessing the "About the Society" section of the website.

The main aim of the membership look-up service is to allow employers and others to check the bona fides of people claiming to be pharmacists. It is provided for guidance only and is not the legal register. Unlike the annual printed register, it does not disclose a member's full registered address, but it gives registration number, title, full name, postal town, registration date and type of registration fee paid. (Because of the way the register is constructed, some search results will not give a postal town. This generally indicates that the address is London-based.)

The type of registration fee paid is indicated by a code letter — f (full-time), p (part-time), r (retired) or o (overseas). The first two indicate that a pharmacist is eligible to practise in Britain; the other two mean that the pharmacist cannot practise without first paying a top-up fee.

The quickest way to search the register is by entering the member's registration number. To search by name, one can enter just the surname or the surname and a forename. The service will also search by part names, since it will look for all names that contain the letters supplied. For example, entering "j" for forename and "sin" for surname could return, among others, "Jack Sinclair," "Gulraj Singh" and "Jennifer Cousins" as possible results.

The online Register of Premises allows users to check details of any currently registered premises. Each result gives the owner's name, the trading name, the full postal address and the date of registration. (Users should note, however, that the owner's name could be up to a month out of date because a transfer of ownership need not be notified to the Society for up to 28 days after the transfer.)

The register can be searched by postcode or by the first line of the pharmacy address. Results can also be obtained from any part of the postcode or address. For example, one could search for all pharmacies in the Edinburgh postal area by entering the first two letters of the Edinburgh postcode, "eh". This method will, however, also return addresses elsewhere that have those letters at the end of their postcode.

For both registers, a search will return a maximum of five results per page, with an indication of how many further pages of search returns are available for viewing.

Following the introduction of these online services, the Society's registration section will no longer provide telephone confirmation of whether members are eligible to practise or premises are registered. Checks will now be made only on written request and only on payment of a fee. Requests concerning members should include registration number, full name, date of registration and postal town of the registered address. Requests for premises checks should include the full address (including postcode), the pharmacy' trading name and the name of the owner (sole proprietor or company). The request should be accompanied by a cheque to cover search charges, made payable to "RPSGB". The charge is £25 for the first search and £10 for each subsequent search, up to a maximum of 25 searches per letter. Requests should be posted to Registration Section, Royal Pharmaceutical Society, 1 Lambeth High Street, London SE1 7JN.

(The Society is also able to check historical register information, dating back to the first register of "pharmaceutical chemists" and "chemists and druggists" in 1869 and the first register of premises in 1936. Enquiries about this service and the fees payable should be addressed to the Society's Museum office.)