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The Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) has published a new emergency supply “mythbuster”.
Emergency supply at the request of a patient or a prescriber allows a pharmacist to give a prescription-only medicine to the patient under certain situations, such as when the patient has run out of their medicine or they are away from home and cannot access their medicine.
The mythbuster, which was published on 30 March 2017, addresses two commonly held misconceptions: that the General Pharmaceutical Council, the independent regulator for pharmacy in Great Britain, would not approve of an emergency supply; and that a pharmacist’s employer would also not approve.
The document also advises pharmacists to exercise their “professional judgement to decide which course of action will be in the best interest of the patients”, and is intended to be used alongside RPS guidance on emergency supply, which provides details of the information pharmacists need to gather in order to decide whether an emergency supply requested by a prescriber or patient is appropriate or not.
