Empowering you to meet regulatory and best practice requirements

Over recent months, we have received several reports of needle stick injuries that involve a contaminated needle and that have occurred when a team member or external contractor has emptied a general waste bin.

It is essential that all needles and ‘sharps’ used in the provision of a pharmacy service are disposed of in a yellow sharps bin and not in a general waste bin. Butterfly needles (used for phlebotomy in the Our Future Health research study) must also be disposed of in a sharps bin and the safety lock on the device should be activated prior to disposal. 

All pharmacy and non-pharmacy team members involved in the provision of a vaccination service and that support the Our Future Health research study should be familiar with the guidance provided in Boots SOPs Appendix 1: Dealing with a Needle Stick Injury. This document includes guidance to help prevent needle stick injury and is available on BootsLive. 

The poster entitled ‘Dealing with a Needle Stick Injury’ , which should be displayed in each pharmacy consultation room, is also available on the same BootsLive page.

Please be aware of a change to the email address of two teams within the SPO.

For support with PIERS, an incident or complaint, matters relating to contact from an external body (such as the Police or an NHS team), fitness to practice concerns, or for any general query to the SPO, please email pharmacy.office@boots.co.uk (previously suptpharmoffice@boot.co.uk).

For matters relating to GPhC Inspection reports, SOP compliance, GPhC/PSNI registration (including ‘red line’ drawings), or CD destruction, please email Pharmacy.Regulation@boots.co.uk (previously profstandardsoff@boots.co.uk).

Note: these email addresses are for internal use only; please do not share either of these outside of the Company without the prior agreement of the team concerned.

Initiatives that are designed to support the efficiency and safety of the dispensing process, such as the Defined Duration Clinical Check (DDCC) and Assisted Due Date Dispensing (ADDD), continue to be rolled out across our pharmacies. The SPO team closely monitors all incidents reported on PIERS where the use of a new dispensing system is listed as a potential causative factor. This is so that any risks an initiative may introduce can be identified and fully understood. Monitoring in this way will also allow for the increased level of safety brought about by a new system to be clearly demonstrated.

Pharmacy team members and store leaders are asked to support the optimal monitoring of incidents associated with these new dispensing systems by being mindful of the following points when reporting a pharmacy incident on PIERS and answering the question ‘What dispensing systems were involved in this incident?’:

• If your store does not currently use DDCC and/or ADDD,  please do not tick the associated option on the drop-down list provided
• If your store uses DDCC and/or ADDD, please only tick the relevant option where use of the new dispensing system is considered to be a causative factor of the incident that has occurred. For example, use of DDDC or ADDD is unlikely to be a causative factor for a handout error and it would, therefore, not be appropriate to select either of these in the incident report even though the new dispensing system may have been in use as part of the dispensing process.

IMPOR

TANT: Private prescription considerations