The CQC is set to “absorb” the regulation of businesses where pharmacists “are not working from a registered premises”, the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) today (October 13) revealed.
The announcement came after a delegate at the Pharmacy Show in Birmingham asked GPhC chief pharmacy officer and deputy registrar Roz Gittens whether the CQC “will overtake the regulation of online prescribing by pharmacists”.
Read more: GPhC fails FtP timeliness evaluation again as performance ‘deteriorates’
“We have a bit of a legal loophole at the moment” as the GPhC regulates pharmacy premises, pharmacists and pharmacy technicians “but [it doesn’t] regulate businesses,” Gittens said.
“There is that regulatory gap and there’s a lot of confusion around that,” she added.
CQC to “absorb” regulation
“The plan is that the CQC will absorb that part – so this is where we’ve got pharmacists who are not working from a registered premises,” Gittens said.
This would include businesses run by individual pharmacist prescribers who are providing a prescribing service but are not operating from a CQC or GPhC registered premises, she told C+D.
“This is where they may be setting up from a home [or] office space, whatever that may look like, but are providing clinics – typically they’re small independent companies,” she said.
Read more: CQC should replace GPhC as pharmacy premises regulator, MPs told
“It may just be that individual [so] they would still be regulated by us as an individual, but that business…our intention is the CQC will pick that up when it comes to England,” she told delegates.
But Gittins stressed that the regulatory loophole is “already covered” in Wales and Scotland.
Last month, the pharmacy regulator failed to meet its own regulator’s standards for the timely processing of fitness-to-practise (FtP) cases for the sixth year running.
Meanwhile in January, Pharmacists' Defence Association (PDA) chair Mark Koziol told MPs at the parliamentary pharmacy inquiry that the CQC should replace the GPhC as pharmacy premises regulator.
