The General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) revealed plans to “review and refresh what [it is] doing in terms of [its] methodology” at the Pharmacy Show in Birmingham this weekend (October 13).
Since methodology changed back in 2019, the regulator hasn’t “done a full review…to actually check [its] three-pronged” inspecting approach – which includes themed, intelligence-led and random-sample inspections – GPhC chief pharmacy officer and deputy registrar Roz Gittens told delegates.
Read more: PDA demands axe for GPhC after inspection numbers collapse
“How well is that actually working, and can we better represent…the volume of work we’re actually doing?” she said.
Gittens added that the regulator’s “report will be going to council, so will be in the public domain in December”.
“So watch this space,” she told conference delegates.
“Everybody loves to hate a regulator”
Gittens stressed that the regulator does “a lot more” than just the work reflected in its inspection figures, adding that these “probably do a disservice to our inspectorate”.
She added that the GPhC has done “well over 1,000” assurance visits – which are not “full blown” inspections but occur “as a result of concerns that have been raised”.
Read more: CQC to ‘pick up’ regulation of pharmacists prescribing from home
“When you look at our data and go, ‘hang on, how many pharmacies have been inspected’ etc, there’s so much more work going on than is actually shown in our figures,” she said.
And she told delegates that since joining the regulator “earlier this year”, she has noticed that “everybody seems to love to hate a regulator”.
Regulator round-up
In June, the Pharmacists’ Defence Association (PDA) repeated its call for the GPhC to be stripped of its role as the pharmacy premises regulator amid a sharp drop in inspections.
According to the PDA’s calculations, the regulator’s rate of inspections has declined so dramatically that a pharmacy would only expect to have a routine inspection “once every 15-17 years”, despite there being 1,000 fewer pharmacies than in 2019.
Read more: GPhC fails FtP timeliness evaluation again as performance ‘deteriorates’
Meanwhile during the same keynote speech, Gittens this weekend said that the CQC is set to start regulating pharmacist-owned-businesses that are run from unregistered premises.
“There is that regulatory gap and there’s a lot of confusion around that,” she added.
And 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.
