What we heard: developing our approach to regulating registered pharmacies

We had a high level of engagement from patients, pharmacy professionals, employers, about our proposals to develop our approach to regulating registered pharmacies, including publishing inspection reports for the first time.

We received general support for many of the areas covered in our consultation proposals, including introducing three types of inspection, moving to unannounced inspections as a general rule and changing inspection outcomes.

There were also mixed views on some of the proposals and in particular whether improvement action plans should be published, whether we should require all standards to be met for the pharmacy to receive an overall ‘standards met’ outcome and whether pharmacy owners should be expected to display their inspection outcomes in the pharmacy.

Read a summary of the feedback we received on each proposal in the consultation report

How we collected feedback

• Three pre-consultation focus groups with patients
• 812 written responses to our 12 week consultation
• 22 stakeholder events across England, Scotland and Wales
• Engagement with key stakeholders
• YouGov survey of 2040 adults in Great Britain

As part of the consultation we commissioned a YouGov poll, which gathered the views of over 2000 members of the public across Great Britain. The poll results included:

• 79% of respondents agreed that moving to unannounced inspections would provide the public with more assurance that standards are met
•  A significant majority of respondents supported publication of inspection reports (77%), the outcome of the inspection being displayed in the pharmacy (80%) and publication of improvement action plans (73%), with only 4% opposed to each of these proposals

Our Council will consider the final proposals in December 2018 and will use the extensive feedback we have received through the consultation to help them to make their final decisions. We expect to begin implementation of the proposals raised in this consultation in the first part of 2019.