Pharmacies to make annual CD use declarations
NHS community pharmacies in England will have to make regular declarations to primary care trusts about Controlled Drugs under draft plans issued by the Department of Health last week. Private pharmacies will have to complete similar declarations and send them to the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.
The declarations will have to say whether or not CD stocks are held and
will have to be accompanied by a self-assessment of any special circumstances
that might explain any seemingly unusual patterns of supply.
Similar declarations and self-assessments will be required from all health
care organisations that provide clinical services, including GP practices,
and any relevant social care
organisations.
Information gathered in this way will be combined with information from
routine monitoring and reviewed annually to assess whether any additional
monitoring or inspection is necessary.
In primary care, community pharmacies and GP surgeries will be subject
to random inspections. In community pharmacy these will be carried out
by Society inspectors, who will start to include CD inspections in a
proportion of their routine pharmacy visits. Inspections in secondary
care and the private and voluntary sectors will be the responsibility
of the Healthcare Commission. Care homes will continue to be inspected
by the Commission for Social Care Inspection.
Common standards for inspection visits have been developed by representatives
of the Society, the Healthcare Commission, the CSCI, the police and the
NHS in order to ensure consistency in the proposed new arrangements.
The standards set out core activities that should be included in any
inspection and cover such matters as safe storage and proper record keeping.
Ten per cent of locations are to be inspected every year.
To maximise the effectiveness of the proposed new arrangements, the Government
intends to place a statutory duty to share information about potential
CD offences and system failures on inspection bodies together with health
care organisations, the police, social services authorities and the National
Clinical Assessment Service.
Information sharing is to be co-ordinated by primary care trusts, which
will have to designate a senior staff member as an “accountable
officer” responsible for monitoring the use of CDs and ensuring
that appropriate action is taken if problems come to light.
A Scottish Executive spokeswoman said that the draft guidance would be
considered and a decision made whether any action was necessary in Scotland.
The same approach is to be taken in Wales. The DoH hopes to issue final
guidance in the autumn — this consultation closes on 30 September — ready
for implementation in 2006.
David Pruce, the Society’s director of practice and quality improvement,
said: “The Society supports proposals to make the best use of the
existing monitoring and inspection arrangements and is keen to ensure
that any new arrangements support improvements in quality and practice
and balance the need to strengthen controls with the need to ensure that
patients can access the Controlled Drugs they clinically require.”
The draft guidance is accessible as a PDF file (90K). |
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