A consultation is a formal process we use to get views of individuals or organisations who are affected by our work.
This includes:
- patients, carers, people who use pharmacy services and members of the public
- pharmacists and pharmacy technicians
- students and trainees
- pharmacy owners
- professional bodies and organisations
- other regulators
- governments
- educators
- employers
We usually hold consultations for between 8 and 12 weeks. We use a combination of online surveys, one-to-one meetings, workshops, webinars and focus groups to hear the views of all of our key stakeholders.
The consultation process involves three stages:
- Pre-consultation work, such as planning, testing and policy development
- Launch and running of the consultation, including promoting the consultation to key audiences and holding engagement events
- Post-consultation work, such as analysis, reporting, publication, and any follow-up work
In line with the Equality Act 2010, we produce Equality Impact Assessments to see if our consultation proposals may have had an impact on people who share any of the protected characteristics, such as race, age or disability.
As part of our commitment to good practice, our consultations are based on the Cabinet Office consultation principles guidance. This helps us to decide when and how we consult, and who we consult with.
We will use your response to help us develop our work. We ask you to give us some background information about you and, if you respond on behalf of an organisation, your organisation. We use this to help us analyse the possible impact of our plans on different groups. We are committed to promoting equality, valuing diversity and being inclusive in all our work as a health professions regulator, and to making sure we meet our equality duties. There is an equality monitoring form at the end of the survey. You do not have to fill it in, but if you do, it will give us useful information to check that this happens.
We publish a report about all our consultations. If you respond as a private individual, we will not list your name in the published report or publish your response. If you respond on behalf of an organisation, we will list your organisation’s name and may publish your response in full unless you tell us not to. If you want any part of your response to stay confidential, you should explain why you believe the information you have given is confidential.
Occasionally, the GPhC may need to disclose information under the laws covering access to information (usually the Freedom of Information Act 2000). We will usually anonymise responses or ask for your consent to disclose information, but please be aware that we cannot guarantee confidentiality. We use SmartSurvey to collect responses to our consultations. You can read SmartSurvey’s privacy policy on their website. We take a copy of all responses to analyse at the GPhC and delete the information held in SmartSurvey when our work is complete.
Under data protection law, you may ask for a copy of your response to this consultation or other information we hold about you, you may also ask us to delete your response. For more information about your rights and who to contact please read our privacy policy.
