Empowering you to meet regulatory and best practice requirements

This month’s Patient Safety Champions’ letter focuses on ‘My Pharmacy Standards’ and on evaluating and reviewing the actions taken through this important piece of work to enable you and your team members to develop patient safety and dedicate more time to providing exceptional patient care by releasing capacity through increased efficiency. Your Patient Safety Champion will review the ‘My Pharmacy Standards’ and the actions undertaken with you and your team members to ensure that these have been embedded. Please share with your Patient Safety Champion any ideas for SMART-ER actions to support patient safety in your pharmacy.

With Easter and multiple Bank Holidays on the horizon, take the time now to plan, particularly if your pharmacy supports vulnerable patients such as care home residents and/or those requiring supervised consumption. Remember that the Pharmacy Helpdesk team is available to help with professional queries on every Bank Holiday except Easter Sunday so please ensure team members, including locum pharmacists, working during this time have the relevant contact details available in the dispensary. 

The APTUK award nomination window is open! This is a brilliant opportunity to shine a light on the incredible role Boots pharmacy technicians play. Awards are open (until 30 April 2025) to members and non-members of APTUK. Winners will be announced at the APTUK conference in September 2025. You can submit a nomination here. 

All pharmacy technicians should now have completed the fifth module of the programme. The sixth, and final, module will be available on an individual’s Boots Learning account from 1 May 2025 provided the fifth module has been fully completed. Please continue to develop and apply the skills and behaviours learnt throughout the programme and if applicable complete any outstanding modules during April.

Pharmacy teams should ensure that all items in each dispensary within the store are date checked at the appropriate intervals, and that this is recorded weekly on the Pharmacy Date Checking Matrix (as per SOP OD2). The matrix should include all areas where items are stored, including the Controlled Drug cabinet(s), fridge(s) and areas where items such as dressings and antibiotics requiring reconstitution are kept. Please also include consultation areas within the matrix, so that stock used for pharmacy services, e.g. adrenaline, or research projects such as Our Future Health, will be checked. The Store Manager should also make sure that date-checking of retail stock (including medicines and baby milk) is completed regularly. 

Further information and resources to support the pharmacy date checking processes are 
available here.

There may be instances in which a pharmacist or pharmacy team member needs to contact a prescriber who has issued an electronic private prescription. It is important that pharmacy team members are aware with which providers we have a company-agreed process in place to accept electronic private prescriptions and how to contact the provider if there is a query regarding a prescription.  

Information regarding the processes to follow in such an instance are available on BootsLive. For prescriptions issued by a clinician at: 

• Boots Online Doctor
• Another provider with which we have an agreement in place

When dispensing a generic prescription for morphine sulphate modified release (MR) capsules, Columbus will provide different product options; these may include formulations indicated for different dosage intervals, i.e. 12-hourly and 24-hourly. Always check the details on the prescription carefully to ensure that the appropriate brand/formulation is supplied. 

Brand name prescribing of morphine sulphate MR capsules is recommended to reduce the risk of confusion in dispensing. For further information, please refer to the ‘Brand Specific Prescribing Considerations at Clinical Assessment’ guidance which is available here.