Pharmacy professionals will not be held responsible for actions of NHS volunteers, if pharmacy teams “acted in accordance with the standards,” the GPhC and RPS have said.
In a joint statement issued on Wednesday (15), the two organisations said that “using NHS Volunteer Responders in good faith in line with the service specifications of the Pandemic Delivery Service will not be regarded as responsible for actions of other people outside of their control.”
The GPhC and RPS have welcomed the recently launched Pandemic Delivery Service and use of volunteers as a means of supporting pharmacy teams with tasks such as delivering medicines.
The RPS has produced this volunteering guidance for pharmacy professionals working with volunteers.
Contractors and their teams have been reassured that the use of NHS volunteers was as an option to get medicines to ‘shielded’ patients when it’s not possible to use patient’s own representatives or pharmacy delivery services.
Community pharmacies in England are now contractually obliged to ensure that “a specific group of extremely vulnerable patients who are self-isolating at home, currently for 12 weeks” get their prescriptions delivered.
