Blog
CQC ‘Outstanding’ for Frimley Park Hospital
England’s Chief Inspector of Hospitals recently awarded their first ‘Outstanding’ rating to Frimley Park Hospital. The hospital’s chief executive, Andrew Morris, remarked on “the emphasis on team working and cooperation across specialities” as major influencers in...
GPs, How Do You Rate?
The CQC have recently published 75 reports on the quality of care provided by GP practices that have been inspected under the new approach and 60 of those have been found to be good or outstanding which means that 15 have been found to be requiring improvement or in...
Display of your CQC rating
From 1 April 2015 providers will have a legal requirement to display their Care Quality Commission (CQC) rating in their premises and online through their website. The CQC are providing guidance to suppliers on how they should display their rating. They also plan to...
Robot & Automation Is this the Technology that You Need to Improve your Business?
You’re probably not old enough to remember Tomorrow’s World, a BBC science program featuring all the up and coming tech, a bit like a 1st generation Gadget Show. Anyway in the 80’s they spent a lot of time predicting how the world would look in the next Millenium, it...
Community Pharmacy Contract hard to find? Is opening a Distance Selling Pharmacy an option?
We get many inquiries asking for advise on opening a new retail pharmacy. As anyone who has looked into this can testify to, the biggest hurdle is finding an area where an application stands a chance of succeeding. From 1st April 2013, every Health and Wellbeing Board...
Instilling “Quality-Conscience”
Instead of monitoring the signs around us of quality failure, such as the worrying observation that since the early 1990’s the number of product recalls reported by consumer product safety commissioners around the world has increased by almost 5 times, let us turn...
Managing Change in an Organisation
One of the most common non-conformities that I see when auditing against the GDP Guidelines (or, in a previous life as an ISO auditor) is the lack of documented management when it comes to change. Of course businesses need to be flexible and move within quickly...
Do Pharmacists need more prescriptive regulation?
Pharmacy is a highly regulated profession and occasionally pharmacists may face prosecution. Prosecuting pharmacists for dispensing errors has always been a rare case. The 2009 Elizabeth Lee case with a suspended 3-month prison sentence shook the confidence of...
Good to be Grey? Not really
One of the biggest frustrations when working with any of the regulatory bodies are all of the ‘grey areas’. Seek guidance from them and the usual response is that the “law or regulation states this, we understand that your circumstance doesn’t fit into this...
Changing sector: from Community Pharmacy to Hospital Practice a tale of two worlds?
Hospital pharmacy is a very competitive sector, if you look back ten years or so, most hospitals had pharmacists on the ‘shop floor’ undertaking traditional dispensing tasks, making it relatively easy for a retail pharmacist to switch between community pharmacy and...
MHRA closes website in the battle against the illegal trade in medicines.
On the 8th January, 2015 the MHRA issued a press release relating to the closing down of websites that are offering falsified and unlicensed medicines. As Contract RPs, we work tirelessly to ensure that our clients do not, inadvertently, purchase or supply falsified...
Pharmacist??? We need a break?!?!
With many pharmacies extending their opening hours and the ongoing battle to increase the number of prescription items dispensed daily it is more important than ever to ensure your pharmacist and technicians take the breaks they need and are entitled to. Workplace...