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Pharmacy minister Stephen Kinnock has said that the government will publish the response to its consultation on pharmacy supervision and introduce legislation later in 2025.
In a parliamentary answer, published on 6 May 2025, Kinnock said: “The government is committed to publishing the response to the public consultation entitled ‘Pharmacy supervision’ and to bringing forward the associated legislation later this year.”
In December 2023, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) published its consultation on pharmacy supervision, which ran until February 2024 and set out proposals to amend the Medicines Act 1968 and The Human Medicines Regulations 2012.
The proposals include enabling pharmacists to authorise pharmacy technicians to carry out, or supervise others carrying out, the preparation, assembly, dispensing, sale and supply of medicines; enabling pharmacists to authorise any member of the pharmacy team to hand out checked and bagged prescriptions in the absence of a pharmacist; and allowing pharmacy technicians to supervise the preparation, assembly and dispensing of medicines in hospital aseptic facilities.
In December 2023, the DHSC estimated the proposals could provide efficiencies of more than £380m for community pharmacies over the following ten years.
An impact assessment published by the DHSC in November 2023 said: “Reform will enable pharmacy technicians to take greater responsibility for running dispensaries, allowing pharmacists to spend a greater proportion of their time delivering patient-facing clinical services, using their training and expertise — including prescribing — to release capacity in the wider NHS.”
The DHSC’s proposals were broadly welcomed by the pharmacy sector; however, Community Pharmacy Scotland said in its consultation response, published in December 2023, that it disagreed with the first of the proposals.
“The preparation and assembly of [pharmacy] and [prescription-only] medications can be safely carried out from a registered pharmacy premises, without requiring supervision by a Responsible Pharmacist or an authorised pharmacy technician,” its response argued.
The Association of Pharmacy Technicians UK’s consultation response, published in February 2024, agreed with all of the DHSC’s proposals.
There have been other attempts to clarify rules around pharmacist supervision of community pharmacies over the past decade.
In September 2017, a document on the future of supervision — prepared by a working party of the Rebalancing Medicines Legislation and Pharmacy Regulation Programme Board — was leaked to the press; however, subsequent discussions on an overhaul of supervision did not lead to any concrete proposals.
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I wish I'd known this was going to happen before I'd chosen to do pharmacy. It doesn't make any clinical or logical sense. And I don't think patients are aware of this.
I suppose we'll just have to do what they tell us. And if we still have a job, then lucky us.
I think with this proposal, more patients harm as patients safety is compromised badly. I do sometimes ask some technicians if they could identify any patient risk in medicines on a Rx. Even though it’s clear to me the patient is at risk if I allow that Rx to be dispensed, the Technicians had no clue what was wrong on the Rx. Sad. Money first, safety second
But that’s your job. Don’t you clinical the prescriptions before they are to be dispensed?