The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 269 No 7215 p350
14 September 2002

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All pharmacists should be eligible to be prescribers, task group report says

All pharmacists should be eligible to become supplementary prescribers, a report prepared by the Pharmacist Prescribing Task Group recommends, but priority for the necessary training will have to be decided by the needs of the National Health Service.

The report, issued on 6 September, is the first of two to be prepared by the task group, which is chaired by Dr June Crown and includes representatives from other prescriber groups and academia. A second, covering independent prescribing by pharmacists, is to be published early next year.

The report makes 12 recommendations: five for the Department of Health on the implementation of supplementary prescribing by pharmacists, six for the Royal Pharmaceutical Society on standards, training and registration, and one for the NHS and Higher Education Funding Councils on financial support.

Looking at how supplementary prescribing could work, the task group says that there should not be any restriction on the range of medicines to which pharmacist prescribers can have access. Even Controlled Drugs and unlicensed medicines should be allowed if patients need them. Access to patients' medical records will be critical to the success of supplementary prescribing and, until electronic patient records are widely available, patient-held records should be introduced, it says.

One area of contention has been around maintaining separation between prescribing and dispensing. The report says that such separation is no longer necessary because all pharmacist prescribers will have to participate in an approved programme of clinical governance that establishes sound systems for patient safety. It adds that the Royal Pharmaceutical Society should develop national standards for such programmes. A second, technical check for the accuracy of dispensing may be necessary "but such a check does not have to be carried out by a pharmacist", the report says.

Additional training will be needed to allow pharmacists to become prescribers, but this should eventually be part of degree courses and preregistration training.

The task group endorses most of the proposals made by the Department of Health in its consultation paper MLX 284 on supplementary prescribing by pharmacists and nurses (PJ, 20 April, p521). However, it wants to see a more concise definition of supplementary prescribing adopted, proposing that it be defined as: "A voluntary partnership between the independent prescriber and a supplementary prescriber, to implement an agreed patient- specific clinical management plan with the patient's agreement." The task group also wants a clearer definition of what a clinical management plan is.

The task group is an independent group set up by the Society. Its report can be found on the Society's website (PDF 100K).