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The General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) has issued advice for newly qualified prescribing pharmacists to "highlight key considerations to help pharmacists prescribe safely, effectively and within their competence from the outset". 

The advice covers key areas including: 

• GPhC guidance for pharmacist prescribers
• Scope of prescribing practice
• Support and mentorship
• Prescribing decisions
• Private prescribing
• Indemnity
• Revalidation
• What employers and managers should do to support newly qualified prescribers.

The GPhC advises that pharmacist prescribers must be able to justify prescribing decisions and use professional judgement in the patients’ best interests, and that they needed to understand their scope of prescribing practice as this was a "vital part" of professional judgement. 

Pharmacists should only prescribe within their "knowledge, competence and experience" gained in core training, and when starting work they needed to "agree the scope of your prescribing with your employer". This they said "may sometimes mean saying ‘no’ to a prescribing request which you consider to be outside of your current knowledge, skills and competence". 

Examples of this included (but were not limited to):

• Prescribing higher-risk medicines or those that require additional safeguards
• Prescribing for complex conditions which may need specialist or expert input
• Prescribing in situations where you may not have all the necessary information (e.g. for the medical history was incomplete, or the patient has an undifferentiated diagnosis).

If this happens, the GPhC said, "you should seek support with the request or refer it to another prescriber". However, pharmacists also had to "consider the risks and benefits of prescribing or not prescribing a medicine in any given situation".

Other important advice included checking whether it was necessary to register with other healthcare regulators when providing private prescribing services (e.g. Care Quality Commission in England, Healthcare Improvement Scotland or the Healthcare Inspectorate Wales), and ensuring professional indemnity cover was in place to cover all aspects of prescribing and that any practice conditions that were part of the cover were complied with. 

GPhC (2026) Advice for newly qualified prescribing pharmacists