Empowering you to meet regulatory and best practice requirements

This month, pharmacy team members who work in our non-hospital, walk-in dispensaries will be reading, understanding and implementing the updated Core Dispensing SOPs. These SOPs cover many of the most frequently occurring processes across our pharmacies. Thorough understanding of – and compliance with – these SOPs by the pharmacy team members who use them is essential to maintain and promote patient safety. Our Hospital Core Dispensing SOPs and Care Services SOPs have not been updated this month; pharmacy team members working in such areas should continue to use these SOPs, as applicable.

Each pharmacy team member has been assigned the relevant digital SOPs through their MyHub account. These SOPs must be completed by all team members to whom they have been assigned by 16 June 2023.

Your Patient Safety Champion will be assisting you to reinforce the processes in the Core Dispensing SOPs, with a focus on those that can have the greatest impact on patient safety in your pharmacy. For many teams, this will be focusing on the safety of the handout or handover of dispensed items, including the importance of the full and correct use of eRetrieval, whenever possible.

A new Prescriber Hub has been launched on BootsLive, providing the latest information about accessing training to become a prescriber, prescribing in Boots and prescribing services. The BootsLive Hub shares the new Prescriber Pathway and the governance that has been developed to support pharmacist prescribing practice, and provides the tools and resources needed to ensure that prescribing services can be delivered competently and confidently.

This should now be the first point of reference for information regarding Independent Prescribing and opportunities for prescribing in Boots. Find out more on BootsLive.

We have recently become aware of several instances in which out-of-date Hana^® 75 microgram film-coated tablets have been sold from the pharmacy backwall.

Although the pharmacy medicines located on the backwall and general sales list medicines sold from open shelving in stores do not usually form part of the dispensary date-checking matrix, pharmacy professionals have a responsibility to ensure that medicines and other retail healthcare products sold undergo appropriate date checking.

Please work together with your store leaders to ensure that the store(s) you work in have robust date-checking processes in place for these products and that these processes are adhered to.

Pharmacy team members are reminded of the need to ensure patients being treated with isotretinoin are made fully aware of the potential risks of treatment in addition to the expected benefits. Counselling should include making sure the patient is aware they should seek guidance if they feel that their mental health or sexual function is affected, or is worsening, and to stop treatment and seek urgent medical advice if they develop a serious side effect. All women of childbearing potential who are prescribed isotretinoin should have a pregnancy prevention programme in place.

Please note that isotretinoin is a black triangle drug, meaning that all suspected adverse reactions should be reported via the MHRA Yellow Card Scheme.

It is important that empty medicine bottles are disposed of in the correct way to ensure the safety of customers and team members. Regardless of the method of disposal, any patient-identifiable data on each bottle must be removed or redacted prior to appropriate disposal.

Information on medicine bottle disposal is available on BootsLive.