Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if she will bring forward legislative proposals that enable pharmacists to amend prescriptions when their stocks dictate their ability to prescribe the type and weight of a drug.

The Department has no plans to introduce legislative proposals to allow pharmacists to amend prescriptions. Allowing pharmacists to take local action to alter prescriptions could have adverse impacts on patients, because pharmacies will not know the reasons why a medicine has been prescribed, or in what particular way. Supplying an alternative without full oversight of supply issues could also create a knock-on shortage of the alternative, and could thereby have the potential to exacerbate rather than mitigate a supply problem.

However, in the case of certain shortages, Serious Shortage Protocols (SSPs) enable community pharmacists to supply a specified medicine or device in accordance with a protocol rather than a prescription, with the patient’s consent, and without needing to seek authorisation from the prescriber. SSPs are not introduced unless clinically appropriate, and unless sufficient supplies of the alternative product to be supplied in accordance with the SSP are available to support the market.