Continuing Professional Development for our pharmacies

A message from Claire Nevinson, Pharmacy Superintendent

Like many of you, I recently completed my annual revalidation with the General Pharmaceutical Council, which includes submitting evidence of Continuing Professional Development (CPD). Afterwards, I was reflecting on how we continually obtain knowledge and evolve as individuals in order to maintain our standards of clinical governance in practice. CPD is about striving to continually develop and learn, and clinical governance is about taking a systemic approach to continual improvement. In many ways, they both have the same goal: to try to achieve professional excellence.

In Boots, to maintain our standards and deliver clinical governance, we use audits to identify areas that require improvement. A recent audit across our pharmacies identified some common themes where inconsistencies were common. Members of my team have prepared an article which features in this edition of The Professional Standard – I would encourage you to read through this article and use it as a prompt to consider and review the professional standards within your pharmacy. One theme that presented in the recent audit was that sometimes pharmacy teams were unsure about who is required to review or ‘sign-off’ certain documents. Therefore, to help make this clearer, new versions of the monthly Patient Safety Review template and the date-checking record templates have been designed.

November sees the launch of the new digital versions of the Controlled Drugs (CD) SOPs. Again, as we consider clinical governance and strive to describe the processes that are the safest and most efficient, we have identified a number of changes to best practice and have incorporated these into these SOPs. For example, we’ve separated out conducting the weekly physical CD balance check activity from the processes for investigating a CD balance discrepancy and have built a new mission CD balance discrepancy checklist on MyHub – this replaces the old paper CD balance discrepancy checklist. I urge you to work with your pharmacy team members to ensure these changes are adopted and embedded effectively.

I hope you find these latest improvements helpful as you work to continually improve your pharmacy team’s clinical governance standards and as you prepare your pharmacy for the approach of the festive season.