The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 274 No 7349 p573
14 May 2005

This article
Reprint   Photocopy

  Acrobat Reader

News summary

“Personal control” could extend to 10 pharmacies

One pharmacist could have “personal control” over up to 10 pharmacies, provided that there is still one supervising or duty pharmacist for every individual pharmacy, the Scottish Pharmaceutical Federation has said in its response to the Scottish Executive Health Department’s consultation on the pharmacy workforce.

This would require a reinterpretation of the term “personal control” and the SPF proposes that it should mean taking responsibility for:

· Ensuring safe systems of work
· Allocating tasks to staff
· Ensuring staff are aware of personal responsibilities
· Clinical governance and audit

The SPF believes that the presence of a pharmacist in the pharmacy is crucial to ensure patient safety but concedes that remote supervision is now a possibility. “There is no substitute for face-to-face contact between pharmacists and patients but with modern technology [the SPF] accepts that it is possible for a pharmacist to make an intervention on a P medicine sale or a prescription being dispensed without being ‘bodily’ present in the pharmacy,” the SPF states. It warns that the conditions for remote supervision must be clearly defined but says that it will be difficult to set a limit for the time a supervising pharmacist may be absent from the pharmacy.

The SPF does not support the suggestion that supervision can be delegated to a non-pharmacist member of the pharmacy team but says that if remote supervision becomes a reality then there will be a need for pharmacy technicians to have an enhanced role within the dispensing process.

The SEHD consultation “Making the best use of the pharmacy workforce” was published earlier this year (PJ, 12 February, p165) and followed a similar consultation in England (PJ, 19 March, p323 and 18/25 December 2004, p873).