Monitoring Report - General Pharmaceutical Council 2022/23

We have published our most recent report for the General Pharmaceutical Council  (GPhC).

Key statistics

• The GPhC maintains a register of pharmacists, pharmacy technicians and pharmacies in Great Britain
• 88,209 pharmacy professionals and 13,577 pharmacy premises on the register

Key findings

Fitness to Practise timeliness

We have had concerns about the time it takes the GPhC to deal with fitness to practise cases in recent years. The position has not improved this year. Although the GPhC is taking steps to improve its performance, it is still taking too long to progress cases through the system, and the number of open older cases has increased. Due to the serious and ongoing delays we have concluded that Standard 15 is not met. As this is the fifth year in a row that the GPhC has not met our Standard for timeliness in fitness to practise, we have taken action under our escalation policy. We have written to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and the Health and Social Care Committee to raise our concerns and we will monitor the GPhC’s work to improve its performance in this area.

Fitness to practise decisions

We carried out an audit of Standard 16 this year. We found the large proportion of decisions we reviewed were reasonable, with clear, accurate and detailed reasons recorded. We only saw a small number of issues in relation to decisions and were reassured to see that the GPhC has implemented learning when issues arise. We are satisfied that the GPhC has addressed the concerns we have previously raised, and we are pleased to report that it has met Standard 16 this year.

Fitness to practise support to parties

We also carried out an audit of Standard 18 this year. The GPhC has been working to address the concerns we have previously raised and introduced a number of measures to improve the support it offers to parties during the fitness to practise process. We saw good examples of tailored and compassionate communication, notably to complainants with supportive tone of voice. The GPhC has therefore met Standard 18 this year.