The Department of Health and Social Care (DH) announced yesterday (April 28) that it will, following parliamentary approval, amend legislation to give pharmacy regulators – rather than ministers – the power to define the role of the responsible, superintendent and chief pharmacist.
Read more: GPhC should decide when responsible pharmacists can oversee multiple sites, DH concludes
The DH also suggested that a superintendent pharmacist should be “a senior manager in the retail pharmacy business…who plays a significant role (irrespective of whether others also do) in the making of decisions about how the whole or a substantial part of the activities of the retail pharmacy business are operated”.
“The SP cannot simply be any senior manager,” it stressed.
The current “lack of clarity” in legislation relating to this “has allowed some retail pharmacy companies to confer the role on someone nominally and not necessarily with sufficient seniority or authority”, it reasoned.
Susan Hunneyball, consultant solicitor at Gordons Partnership law firm, said this new requirement “may have a significant effect on how many pharmacies are structured”.
“It is, of course, important that the SP is in a position to minimise risks to the services offered, and that may be difficult if the role is nominal,” she said. “But it may challenge smaller pharmacy businesses to replace an SP as they will have a smaller pool of people to call on.”
Read more: What's wrong with the superintendent and responsible pharmacist rules?
However, the “further definition” of the roles and responsibilities of SPs “has to be a positive step”, she told C+D today (April 29).
“I can also see utility of this in fitness-to-practise cases, where respective roles of SP and RP are often scrutinised,” she added.
Is moving powers to regulators a step too far?
The DH further proposed to delegate the decision of whether an SP can hold the role for only one retail pharmacy business at a time to the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) and the Pharmaceutical Society of Northern Ireland.
Read more: DH looks to remove restriction for one superintendent per business
“Any change [relating to this] would be a fundamental rethink about the way the role is tied into corporate structure,” Ms Hunneyball said.
“I wonder if that is a step too far in moving responsibilities to the regulator.”
Giving regulators the responsibility to determine “the extended role of the SP in clinical and public health services” would also mean they would have to “act responsively and flexibly”.
Ms Hunneyball questioned whether regulators would “have the resources to do this effectively”, considering “they have a lot on their plate already”, such as “issues raised by distance-selling pharmacies”.
The GPhC told C+D today that it welcomed the laying of the draft orders and it would “engag[e] and consult extensively” on any standards that arise from the proposals “in the coming years”.
