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There is €room for improvement€ on the part of community pharmacists in reporting medicines safety incidents, according to the head of patient safety at NHS England.

Speaking at a North East London LPC event, Professor David Cousins said the national commissioning body received only 39 incident reports from community pharmacists in 2012 out of an estimated 1.8m serious prescribing errors.

Community pharmacy could make a bigger impact to prevent harm, he maintained. Pharmacists provide an important safeguard to minimise patient harm from prescribing errors, but services are not well defined, documented or recognised.

However the sector itself needs to be more €up front€ about incident reporting. €The profession needs to help itself in terms of providing evidence [of its patient safety role]. Community pharmacy is an essential part of the medicines safety process for patients. But we need evidence that pharmacists are clinically involved in keeping patients safe.€

For pharmacists to say they wouldn't provide this evidence unless they were paid was €not a helpful stance€.

Professor Cousins called for better use of technology to reduce dispensing errors, such as barcode scanning. €It beggars belief why people aren't talking to us about this,€ he said, taking a swipe at PMR companies among others. There should also be greater access and use of clinical records.