The Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) is working with the Association of Pharmacy Technicians (APTUK) and Pharmacy Forum NI to develop a set of professional standards for error reporting, in order to improve patient safety by sharing and learning from errors.

The standards will define the professional duty for pharmacists, pharmacy technicians and pharmacy teams to be open and honest about mistakes, and to report actual errors and near misses, as well as identifying ways of overcoming barriers to greater incident reporting.

The draft standard is aligned to the ongoing work of the Rebalancing Medicines Legislation and Pharmacy Regulation Programme Board to improve safety for users of pharmacy services, including through the creation of a defence to criminal sanction for inadvertent dispensing errors from registered pharmacies and future proposals to extend to hospital pharmacy.

As part of a consultation on the draft version of the professional standards for error reporting, the RPS is seeking views from all stakeholders including patients, patient groups, pharmacy teams, regulators, Royal Colleges, NHS organisations, colleagues in academia, and pharmacy bodies.

To find out more and provide feedback visit the RPS website.