Category: Safe dispensing practices

Guidance on ensuring safe dispensing practices, covering labelling, error prevention, and compliance with SOPs and legal standards.

Advertising and promotion of medicines Controlled drugs Medicines licensing Over-the-counter (OTC) medicines Pharmacist and technician responsibilities Pharmacy inspections and enforcement Pharmacy premises standards Remote and online pharmacy services Safe dispensing practices

Selling codeine and dihydrocodeine Pharmacy medicines

Certain medicines containing codeine or dihydrocodeine may be sold without a prescription as Pharmacy medicines. However, these medicines are opioids with recognised risks of dependence, misuse and overdose. Combination analgesics may also cause serious harm through excessive consumption of their other ingredients, such as paracetamol or ibuprofen.

Pharmacy owners, responsible pharmacists and other pharmacy professionals must therefore ensure that requests are appropriately assessed and that these medicines are supplied safely.

The legal position comes from several sources:

Controlled drugs Pharmacist and technician responsibilities Pharmacy inspections and enforcement Pharmacy premises standards Record-keeping requirements Safe dispensing practices

Can a pharmacist prescribe and dispense the same medicine?

Pharmacist independent prescribers increasingly provide services in which they assess a patient, prescribe a medicine and arrange for it to be dispensed or supplied from the same pharmacy.

In some services, the pharmacist prescriber may personally undertake every stage. They may assess the patient, make the prescribing decision, generate the prescription, clinically check it, dispense or accuracy-check the medicine and then supply or administer it.

UK medicines legislation does not establish a general requirement that prescribing and dispensing must be undertaken by different healthcare professionals. A pharmacist may therefore prescribe and dispense or supply the same medicine, provided that each activity is lawful and the service is delivered safely.

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Dispensing prescriptions for yourself, family members or friends

Pharmacists may encounter prescriptions issued for themselves, their relatives, friends or colleagues. This may occur routinely where the person uses the pharmacy at which the pharmacist works.

Neither medicines legislation nor the General Pharmaceutical Council’s current standards expressly prohibit a pharmacist from dispensing a valid prescription merely because the patient is the pharmacist or someone with whom they have a close personal relationship.

These prescriptions can ordinarily be dispensed in the same way as prescriptions for other patients. However, the pharmacist must remain capable of exercising objective professional judgement and must not allow familiarity, personal interests or concerns about privacy to compromise the safety or integrity of the dispensing process.

Pharmacist and technician responsibilities Prescription requirements Safe dispensing practices

Self-prescribing: dispensing prescriptions written by prescribers for themselves

Self-prescribing occurs when a registered prescriber issues a prescription for their own treatment. For example, a doctor or pharmacist independent prescriber may present a pharmacy with a prescription on which they are both the prescriber and the named patient.

A self-prescribed prescription is not automatically invalid. However, self-prescribing raises important concerns about independent clinical assessment, access to medical records, objectivity, monitoring and the potential misuse of medicines.

The prescriber and the dispensing pharmacist have separate professional responsibilities. The prescriber is responsible for justifying the decision to prescribe for themselves. The pharmacist must independently decide whether the prescription is lawful and whether supplying the medicine would be safe and professionally appropriate.

Handling complaints and patient safety Pharmacist and technician responsibilities Pharmacy inspections and enforcement Safe dispensing practices

Self-checking dispensed prescriptions

Self-checking occurs when the same pharmacy professional assembles a prescribed medicine and subsequently carries out its final accuracy check.

Using a different competent person to undertake the final accuracy check provides an additional degree of independence. However, neither medicines legislation nor the General Pharmaceutical Council’s standards establish an absolute requirement that two different people must be involved in every dispensing process.

Self-checking is therefore not automatically unlawful. Nevertheless, it removes an independent opportunity to identify an error and should be treated as a dispensing risk that must be appropriately assessed and managed.

Medicines licensing Over-the-counter (OTC) medicines Remote and online pharmacy services Safe dispensing practices

Paracetamol and aspirin: GSL, Pharmacy medicine and POM restrictions

Paracetamol and aspirin are familiar medicines, but their legal status is not always straightforward.

Some paracetamol and aspirin products can be sold from ordinary retail premises as General Sale List medicines. Some can only be sold from a registered pharmacy as Pharmacy medicines. Some products are prescription-only medicines. The correct legal category depends on the exact product, including its formulation, strength, pack size, marketing authorisation and presentation.

This matters because the legal category affects:

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Prescriber restrictions

Doctors, dentists and veterinary surgeons acquire prescribing powers through their professional registration, although doctors must also hold a licence to practise. They have been joined by independent and supplementary prescribers from several other healthcare professions who may prescribe after completing an approved education programme and obtaining the relevant annotation on their professional register.

The existence of a legal prescribing power does not mean that a prescriber may appropriately prescribe every medicine. All prescribers must:

This article summarises the principal legal restrictions applying to each prescriber group.

Medicines licensing Pharmacist and technician responsibilities Prescription requirements Safe dispensing practices

Pregnancy Prevention Programmes

Some medicines carry a high risk of causing serious harm if taken during pregnancy. These risks may include congenital malformations, neurodevelopmental disorders, foetal growth restriction, miscarriage or other serious harm to the unborn child.

Pregnancy Prevention Programmes, often shortened to PPPs, are regulatory risk minimisation measures designed to reduce the chance of pregnancy before, during and shortly after treatment with these medicines. They are particularly important for medicines known or suspected to be teratogenic, including oral retinoids, valproate, topiramate, thalidomide, lenalidomide and pomalidomide.

For pharmacy teams, the important legal and practical point is this: a PPP is not usually a standalone piece of legislation called a “pregnancy prevention law”. Instead, the requirement normally arises from the medicine’s marketing authorisation, Summary of Product Characteristics, Patient Information Leaflet and MHRA-approved risk minimisation materials. The MHRA describes Pregnancy Prevention Programmes as measures that may be put in place where a medicine has a known or potential teratogenic effect: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/risk-minimisation-measures-for-medicines/risk-minimisation-measures-for-medicines

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European Prescriptions

Pharmacists in the UK may occasionally be presented with prescriptions issued abroad. The legal position is specific and limited—only certain prescriptions from defined countries are recognised.

This article explains which foreign prescriptions are valid, what “Europe” means in law, and what pharmacists must check before dispensing.

The supply of prescription-only medicines (POMs) is governed by the Human Medicines Regulations 2012:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2012/1916/contents