Empowering you to meet regulatory and best practice requirements

Golrou (on the left) and Rachael (on the right) are the first Boots pharmacists to hold fellowship roles with Macmillan Cancer Support. Find out some more information below as they discuss their exciting new role and opportunity.

“Our fellowship began last summer, since which time we have been working closely with the Macmillan Centre of Clinical Expertise team. We’ve had the chance to gain lots of insights into their workstreams and clinical experience and have enjoyed being welcomed into their clinical review meetings.

Our focus for the fellowship is to improve the accessibility and availability of Macmillan-trained professionals in Boots stores. This also directly supports the other strand to our fellowship, which is looking more generally at accessibility to advice and information for patients living with cancer. We would like to say a big ‘thank you’ to all those BMIPs who completed our survey just before Christmas. Your responses have helped shape our workstreams going forward and we look forward to sharing more with you in the coming months through various news articles. We would love to hear any stories you have about how you have used your BMIP training to help patients living with cancer or their families. Please email these to us at Golrou.Childs@boots.co.uk and/or Rachael.Smith@boots.com.”

Pharmacy team members in England are reminded that EPS prescriptions that are returned to the NHS Spine at the request of the patient (for example, if a prescription cannot be fulfilled at the pharmacy) will only be available for dispensing at other pharmacies in England and cannot be accessed by pharmacy teams in other parts of the UK.

During routine inspection visits by the regulator, an inspector may enquire about the risk assessment records for a service provided in your store. All risk assessments for pharmacy services (including private services and those that are commissioned by external bodies) are conducted centrally with the support of relevant team members from the Superintendent Pharmacist’s Office, Pharmacy Operations and Pharmacy Services. If you have any queries about a risk assessment for a service, please contact your Professional Standards & Quality Manager.

All pharmacy team members are reminded that a handout or handover error is positioned as a Company ‘Never’ event, and of the important role eRetrieval has in the prevention of such errors.

In order to support full compliance with the updated SOP ‘DIS6: Handing out a dispensed item(s) to the patient or representative’  all pharmacy team members must:

• Put every bag of medication that cannot be handed out immediately into eRetrieval every time it is possible to do so

Scan out every bag of medication at every eRetrieval handout.

The MHRA has a hierarchy for the use of unlicensed medicines based on risk of product origin. This hierarchy is detailed on SOP AD08: Dealing with unlicensed medicines (‘specials’) and is also available on BootsLive via the link provided below.   

If you receive a prescription for an unlicensed medicine, and an equivalent licensed medicine is available, even if its use would be off-label (i.e. not in-line with its licence) under the circumstances, you should ensure that the prescriber is aware of the availability of the licensed product. This is because the use, including off-label use, of a licensed medicine should be considered ahead of using an unlicensed ‘special’ in the hierarchy.

Where an equivalent licensed medicine is available, an unlicensed medicine should only be supplied to a patient if they have a special clinical need that cannot be met by the licensed medicine (including its off-label use). If you are ordering an unlicensed ‘special’ under these circumstances, you will be required to provide details of the patient’s explicit special clinical need on the Unlicensed Medicines Order Form available here.