The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 280 No 7488 p138
9 February 2008

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Yellow card for MHRA

Streamlining the referral process

Yellow card for MHRA

From the week after next, patients all over the UK are to be encouraged to fill in a yellow card — with the help of pharmacists — if they experience a side effect while taking a medicine (p139). Patient involvement in the yellow card scheme was piloted in 2005 and found to be so successful that the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency decided to roll it out across the UK.

So far so good. The trouble is that the latest MHRA campaign, due to last six weeks, is expected to kick off a week on Monday (18 February) and The Journal suspects that for the majority of community pharmacists this is the first they will have heard about it.

Information and posters are to be distributed through wholesalers in the next week, but with so little warning it is unlikely that the campaign will get off to the flying start that it deserves.

Moreover, as far as community pharmacists in England are concerned, the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee has pointed out in its February newsletter that, unless the campaign forms one of the locally agreed primary care trust public health campaigns under Essential Services 4, involvement in the scheme is voluntary.

So what should be a well co-ordinated and planned addition to the scheme to improve the safety and effectiveness of medicines and medicine-taking looks like stalling.

However, let us hope that those pharmacists who do attempt to involve their patients appreciate that they, too, can contribute to the process and increase the number of adverse drug reports from community pharmacy that reach the appropriate authorities.

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Streamlining the referral process

The Council of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society has been concerned that there are far too many cases being referred to the Investigating Committee. The Society has launched a consultation exercise — “Consultation on cases for non-referral to the Investigating Committee”— to find out what the profession believes the threshold for referral should be, so that cases are dealt with in a “proportionate, effective and efficient manner without compromising patient safety”.

It wants to formulate a referral process that is fair both to pharmacists and to patients.

In a pull-out centre section in this week’s issue (PDF 380K), members are asked to consider what sorts of cases are inappropriate for referral to the Investigating Committee, particularly the circumstances when a one-off dispensing error has occurred.

We encourage readers to take part.

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