Empowering you to meet regulatory and best practice requirements

This month’s Patient Safety Champions’ letter focuses on the importance of ensuring a patient’s confidentiality is respected and their privacy maintained. Your Patient Safety Champion will share with you, ‘three Ds’ (Don’t, Discreet and Disclose) and how being mindful of these can help in preventing inappropriate release of information. Please work through the scenario in the letter with your Patient Safety Champion. Please share with your Patient Safety Champion any ideas for SMART-ER actions to support patient safety in your pharmacy.

All pharmacy technicians should now have completed the fourth module of the programme. The fifth module will be available on an individual’s Boots Learning account from 1 March 2025 (provided the fourth module has been fully completed). The fifth module explores mentoring and coaching within the leadership component and a focus on sexual health in the common clinical conditions section. The sexual health programme also introduces pharmacy technicians to the updated OTC medicines checklists (available on the OTC Medicines Checklists BootsLive page) which are used to support the sale of certain medicines. In addition, the Boots Macmillan Information Technician part of the module covers the second part of the end-of-life care module.

In October 2024, an updated version of the Care Card was launched for use alongside The Boots Healthcare Way. This has created referral pathways and product-related queries that can be triaged by a pharmacy technician, enabling pharmacists to focus on other professional tasks and customers to be looked after in a timely manner.  

All pharmacy and healthcare teams are encouraged to take the time to familiarise themselves with the refreshed Care Card. As a pharmacy technician, if there are areas that a pharmacy technician can support with but that you feel are outside of your scope of competence, seek out learning opportunities and collaborate with your peers for support. This will help you to 
build confidence in all aspects of the Care Card and enhance the support you can provide for customers. The Care Card can be accessed here.

Emla Cream is a topical anaesthetic available as a pharmacy medicine and it is used to help numb the skin before skin procedures, such as those involving needles. Emla Cream can be sold for use prior to medical and cosmetic needle procedures. This includes procedures such as lip fillers, microblading and dermal fillers, as well as before tattoo appointments; these are acceptable uses of the product within its product license. The manufacturer’s website has more 
information.

The MHRA’s Drug Safety Update issued in February announced that a review by two specialists remains in place for patients initiating valproate under 55 years of age but that this will not be required for men (or males) currently taking valproate. Further information and supporting materials can be accessed here.

Please remember to continue to follow the ‘High Risk Medicines Supporting Guidance (D): Information for the safe dispensing and handout of valproate’ EVERY time a prescription for valproate is dispensed.