A new legislation introducing new legal defences to prevent the automatic criminalisation of inadvertent dispensing errors are now in place.
The legislation has been signed into law to protect community pharmacists from prosecution over dispensing errors. This change aims to increase patient safety by reducing the fear of criminal prosecution amongst pharmacists and encourage a more open culture of error reporting by reducing this fear.
This has largely been welcomed upon by the working community pharmacists. The next step would be working on ways to reduce dispensing errors.