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The letter's arrived. The pharmacy inspector's going to call anytime during the next four to six weeks. What do you do? Ailsa Colquhoun looks at how you can help your pharmacy premises to inspection success

When the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) launched the new style premises inspection process last year, it said that it expected very few pharmacies to achieve an excellent rating. Some nine months and 1,600 pharmacies later, those words have proved true, with no pharmacies yet to achieve this label and 90 per cent being described only as satisfactory. The GPhC's expectation of excellence is partly based on the fact that the new standards encompass a much wider range of issues than previous standards, and that the contrast would present pharmacists and their teams with a €steep learning curve€ that would take time to achieve, according to GPhC head of inspections Mark Voce.

With pharmacy teams firmly involved in the inspection process, it's essential you're fully informed and prepared to be involved.

Checklist to success

Before the inspector calls:

• Be ready to be involved In a change from the previous inspection model, the inspector will want to talk to you and to see you in action. Your pharmacist should call a team meeting to help you understand what to expect. You may get asked what you would do in a certain situation €“ for example, if you had any concerns relating to a safety of a child and their medicines. There's no need to 'swot up' or start doing anything differently from your usual practice €“ all you need to do is to be able to show how you do things in the pharmacy, and explain why.
• Know what will be inspected There's a lot of information on the regulator's website about what the inspector will be looking at, and the standards they will expect to see €“ these don't relate just to the dispensary, so talk to your pharmacist about which standards relate to your position in the pharmacy.
• Understand the difference between the labels Take a look at the 'labels' of poor, satisfactory, good and excellent, and consider how your attitude and involvement at work would be marked based on the inspection standards. The inspectors have released further guidance on the inspection labels, which is available in the pharmacy standards guide on the GPhC website, along with eight guiding principles for an 'excellent' pharmacy.
• Help collect evidence together Pharmacies can use the evidence bank to understand the types of evidence that can be presented during an inspection, but remember that there isn't a 'onesize- fits-all' approach; if it works in your pharmacy for patients, then it will work for the inspectors. You can help your pharmacist by collecting evidence of the excellent things you do on day-to-day basis. This will include your pharmacy training, as well as SOP files, CD registers, Healthy Living Pharmacy evidence, near miss logs, and complaints records.
• Take the advice of others Ask colleagues for any advice they can share.
• Don't cancel your holiday! The inspection team want to see how the pharmacy runs on a day-to-day basis €“ and that includes when regular staff are absent.
• Do get your duster out There's no need to start rearranging the pharmacy, but do make sure that it is as clean, tidy and professional-looking as possible.

During the inspection:

• Give your time Be ready to spend time with the inspector; you may be looking at a four-hour visit.
• Promote yourself Don't be afraid to blow your own trumpet. The whole team needs to talk about the high standards that the pharmacy is achieving every day, even though these things may seem obvious and familiar to you. Promote what you and the team do well and don't wait to be asked for examples. Things you can do include showing the inspector your patient survey results, letters from grateful customers and your high smoking cessation quit rates.

After the inspection:

Read the report Carefully read the draft report and make it clear as soon as possible if you think some things should change. Your pharmacy has 48 hours to respond to this report. You can start learning from the report immediately. You might also want to think about whether you want to give any feedback on the inspection. The current round of inspections is only a prototype, and the inspectors are learning too.

For more information visit: www.pharmacyregulation.org/pharmacystandardsguide