Empowering you to meet regulatory and best practice requirements - P1
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Empowering you to meet regulatory and best practice requirements
Patient Safety First |
If you were unable to complete last month’s Patient Safety activity, please take the time to do it this month and discuss your learnings with your Patient Safety Champion. This month, your Patient Safety Champion will be continuing to support each member of the pharmacy team with reviewing the accuracy checking process, focusing on what to check at each stage, and using a consistent approach. Use feedback from your Patient Safety Champion to identify any ways you can improve accuracy checking compliance, and develop SMART-ER actions to address this, as appropriate.
REMINDER: Safeguarding |
Pharmacy professionals have a responsibility to take action to safeguard people, particularly adults with care and support needs (often termed ‘vulnerable adults’) and children, and should remain alert to the possibility of issues such as neglect, sexual exploitation and abuse. It is important to fully understand the responsibilities with regards to safeguarding and ensure that the safeguarding escalation plan in your store is kept up to date with relevant local contact telephone numbers.
As part of their role, all Boots pharmacy professionals are required to complete the appropriate safeguarding learning for their location of work, which is as follows:
- England – Electronic Learning for Health: Safeguarding Children and Young People as well as Safeguarding Adults level 2 eLearning modules and assessments
- Wales – WCPPE/HEIW: Safeguarding Children and Young People Level 2 eLearning and assessment
- Scotland – NES/TURAS: Adult Support and Protection Practice Level 2 (Skilled) and Child Protection Practice Level 2 (Skilled) eLearning and any associated assessments
- Northern Ireland – NICPLD: Safeguarding Children and Vulnerable Adults NICPLD distance learning package
The relevant country-specific training must be completed by all pharmacy professionals every two years. Where applicable, the associated assessment must also be completed successfully.
Pharmacy team members who are not registered pharmacy professionals should complete the Boots eLearning module, Level 1 Safeguarding children and vulnerable adults eLearning - a guide for pharmacy and healthcare teams, which is available on Boots Learning. This also should be repeated every two years.
The BootsLive page available here provides links to further country-specific information and some further resources.
NEW: Madopar® special container status |
Madopar® (co-beneldopa) preparations have been determined as meeting the required criteria for Drug Tariff ‘special container’ status. The special container rules now apply to all branded prescriptions for Madopar® and also to generically written prescriptions for product listings in part V111A of The Drug Tariff where Madopar® has been indicated as the reference product. In practice, as co-beneldopa 12.5mg/50mg capsules is currently the only licensed generic co-beneldopa product available in the UK, this is the only one to which the special container status does not apply.
The change to ‘special container’ status for Madopar® is due to be reflected in the January 2023 edition of The Drug Tariff and Columbus will then be updated accordingly. In the meantime, please manually endorse any prescription for which Madopar® is dispensed to reflect the special container rules. The (English) Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee has issued a news article providing information about this topic, including a reminder in the FAQs section of the special container rules: https://psnc.org.uk/our-news/all-madopar-preparations-re-classified-as-special-containers/. This content is applicable in all parts of the UK.
In circumstances in which you may wish to continue to dispense the exact prescribed quantity of Madopar® or affected generic product, including if providing within weekly Medisure packs, there will be additional considerations. Please refer to the FAQs referenced above for some helpful prompts.