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A pharmacist who failed to report driving convictions to the General Pharmaceutical Council has been suspended for six weeks.

The regulator’s fitness-to-practise committee hearing on April 2 this year found Edwin Joseph Nally’s failure to tell it about two convictions, in 2024 and 2025, within seven days or at all, amounted to serious misconduct after he had been warned by the GPhC for failing to report multiple driving convictions in 2013.

The committee said his 2013 warning should have made him “more vigilant about his professional obligation to report any convictions, if not within the seven-day period then certainly within a reasonable period of time”.

Nally’s most recent conviction was delivered on January 20, 2025, at York Magistrates’ Court for driving a BMW 5 Series while disqualified from holding or obtaining a driving licence and driving without third party insurance on July 30, 2024. He was disqualified from driving for three months.

Nally was also convicted at North Yorkshire Magistrates’ Court on January 30, 2024, for failing to provide information relating to the identification of the driver of a Volkswagen Golf on June 9, 2023. Harrogate Magistrates’ Court sentenced Nally in his absence to 12 months disqualification from driving and gave him six points.

Nally admitted to the committee that he failed to report the two convictions but denied his conduct was dishonest or lacked integrity. 

Failure to inform GPhC amounted to serious misconduct

Responding to the allegation of dishonesty, Nally said he did not report the January 30, 2024 conviction because he did not know about it since he was working in Barrow-in-Furness at the time and his “correspondence address remained in Sunderland”.

The committee’s report said: “This was why he did not receive the correspondence asking for information about the driver of the vehicle, which then led to that prosecution.

“He explained this was also the reason why he did not receive the summons for court, which resulted in the matter then being dealt with in his absence, without his knowledge, by the single magistrate.”

Nally said the first he knew about his disqualification from driving was when he was stopped by police on July 30, 2024. He told York Magistrates’ Court in January 2025 that he did not know he was disqualified when he was driving.

The committee found the allegation of dishonesty was not proven and also rejected his conduct lacked integrity.

However, the committee ruled Nally’s failure to inform the GPhC about his convictions within seven days amounted to serious misconduct because he had been given “full confirmation of both convictions” by January 30, 2025, but it was the GPhC who contacted him in March 2025 having been informed by the police.

The committee said his failure to report the convictions within that two-month period “was outside what would be considered a reasonable period of time”.

Such behaviour is unacceptable

It concluded that although “he did not intend to conceal” his convictions from the GPhC, “his lackadaisical approach to reporting them would have appalled fellow practitioners and attracted moral opprobrium, especially after he had been given a warning several years before for precisely the same issue”.

The committee said Nally’s misconduct posed a risk to the public because the GPhC was unable to “start an investigation into these matters in a timely manner to ascertain whether the registrant posed a risk to the public”.

The committee also concluded his failure to report the convictions “in a timely manner” brought the profession into disrepute and found his fitness-to-practise impaired.

The committee said its ruling and six-week suspension was necessary to “uphold professional standards of behaviour, to maintain public confidence in the profession, and to send a message to the profession that such behaviour is unacceptable”.