Empowering you to meet regulatory and best practice requirements

Clinical checks when recorded digitally using the ‘Clinical Check queue’ in Columbus allow a clear and complete view of all the patient’s data on one screen. This assists the pharmacist in the completion of an efficient and comprehensive clinical check, supporting patient safety and outcomes whilst ensuring a clear, robust and accessible audit trail of the clinical assessment. Defined Duration Clinical Checks (DDCCs) additionally allow pharmacists the autonomy to clinically validate a prescription in certain circumstances for 180 days if they feel this is clinically appropriate.

For further guidance, please refer to SOP DIS8, which is available on My Hub, and to the DDCC page on BootsLive.

The ‘Clinical Check queue’ has been in use for almost four years and is currently used to record the clinical checks of over 100,000 prescription groups each month. Whilst currently only accessible in around 750 stores, following a successful pilot it will be rolled out later this year to all stores that have ADDD. Since its development, we have been monitoring for errors potentially linked to DDCC and this monitoring has shown that the system has not introduced any patient safety concerns. The SPO continues to support the digitisation of clinical checks to provide a more robust audit trail, improved patient outcomes and recognise this to be a step towards the ambition of creating a paperless prescription journey and in the future will enable clinical checks to be performed in remote locations, in a similar way to how we currently undertake some New Medicine Service consultations. If you have access to the ‘Clinical Check queue’ (available to toggle ‘ON’ in the tools menu – as shown in the image below) in your pharmacy, please consider as a team how the system can best be used to support patient safety.

In light of the recent increase in cases of measles reported in some parts of the UK, it is important to be aware of the signs and symptoms of measles so that you can advise customers and patients appropriately. Measles spreads very easily and can cause serious problems in some people; being vaccinated against it is the best way to prevent it. If someone was not vaccinated in childhood, they may wish to talk to their GP about having the vaccination. Information on measles and MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination are available on the NHS website.

There have been reports of the theft of tablets during enquiries from patients regarding which brand of a medicine is in stock in the pharmacy. Should a team member receive any requests to see the brand(s) of any medication in stock, it is important to not hand over the medication or to leave the patient unattended with any stock you may have retrieved to assist with the query. This is especially important for medicines that may be subject to misuse. Please be vigilant for this type of distraction theft.

The Boots Prescriber Governance course has been updated and is available on Boots Learning. This course is designed to help IPs attain prescribing rights in Boots and to understand the extent of their professional liability as well support IPs to prepare for and set up the private Boots Prescribing Service in their store. If you’re an IP and are: 

• Already prescribing at Boots, you will notice the updated Prescriber Governance course has been assigned to you for reference. You may want to take some time to review the updated course to ensure that you have all the current information
• Not yet prescribing at Boots and would like to, please refer to the information available via the ‘I want to prescribe at Boots’ link on the BootsLive Prescriber Hub 

The BootsLive Prescriber Hub is available here.