Pharmacy context
The pharmacy is located on a busy high street in a town centre in a largely residential area. It receives most of its prescriptions electronically. The pharmacy provides NHS dispensing services, the New Medicine Service, COVID vaccinations, flu vaccinations and blood pressure checks. It also provides medicines as part of the Community Pharmacist Consultation Service. The pharmacy supplies medicines in multi-compartment compliance packs to a large number of people who live in their own homes and need this support. And it provides substance misuse medications to a small number of people. This was a targeted inspection following concerns raised with the GPhC and not all standards were inspected on this visit.
Inspection summary findings
Principle 1. Governance
The pharmacy does not adequately manage all the risks associated with its services. It orders large amounts of codeine linctus and other medicines liable to abuse, and it is unable to adequately account for them. This increases the risks to the wider public. The pharmacy does not always appropriately protect people's personal information. It largely keeps the records it needs to by law. But it does not always ensure its responsible pharmacist record is filled in properly. So, it could be harder for the pharmacy to show who had been the responsible pharmacist if there was a query.
Principle 2. Staff
The pharmacy has enough team members to keep up to date with its workload. And they do the right accredited training for their roles.
Principle 3. Premises
People can have a conversation with a team member in a private area. The premises provide a safe, secure, and clean environment for the pharmacy's services.
Principle 4. Services, including medicines management
The pharmacy does not provide all its services safely. It has limited systems to ensure that supplies or sales of certain higher-risk medicines are made safely. And it is unable to satisfactorily account for the large quantities of codeine linctus and promethazine elixir that it orders. The pharmacy does not keep all it medicines secure. And it cannot sufficiently demonstrate that it stores all its medicines requiring refrigeration at the appropriate temperatures. However, the pharmacy gets its medicines from reputable suppliers. People with a range of needs can access the pharmacy’s services.
Principle 5. Equipment and facilities
The pharmacy has the equipment it needs to provide its services safely. It uses its equipment to help protect people’s personal information.
What do the inspection outcomes mean?
After an inspection each pharmacy receives one overall outcome. This will be either Standards met or Standards not all met
| The pharmacy has met all the standards for registered pharmacies | |
| The pharmacy has not met one or more of the standards for registered pharmacies |
What does 'pharmacy has not met all standards' mean?
When a pharmacy has not met all standards, they are required to complete an improvement action plan, which you can find via a link at the top left of this page. We monitor progress to check the improvements are made and inspect again after six months to make sure the pharmacy is maintaining these improvements. A new report will then be published.