The General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) is currently reviewing 40 active fitness-to-practise (FtP) cases linked to online pharmacy activities, the regulator’s chief pharmacy officer has confirmed.

Speaking at The Pharmacy Show in Birmingham on 13 October 2024, Roz Gittins said the GPhC has had “over 400 FtP cases linked in some way to online activities” to date, which includes “about 40 cases that are currently active”.

However, she added: “It’s been quite difficult to identify whether these are truly online because sometimes there are other things going on, it’s not just online activities.”

Gittins addressed the Professional Standards Authority report published in September 2024, which concluded that the GPhC “is still taking too long to progress FtP investigations”.

“We know we’ve got a bit of an age cohort that we’re working really hard to work through and many of these pertain to online activities,” she said, adding that delays to closing these cases related to “numerous reasons”, including legal issues that she could not expand on.

The “aged” cases are expected to conclude “within the next few weeks and months”, said Gittins.

In a presentation to delegates, Gittins talked through slides that set out the regulator’s enforcement activity, showing that 68% of online pharmacies were found to have met all standards at inspection.

This is a lower pass rate than for registered pharmacies overall, with 85% of registered pharmacies meeting all standards at inspection.

In April 2022, The Pharmaceutical Journal revealed that online pharmacies were eight times more likely to fail on GPhC regulatory standards compared with bricks-and-mortar pharmacies.

Commenting on insights gained by the GPhC following inspections of online pharmacies, Gittins told delegates that “some of the clinical services that are being delivered [by online pharmacies] we would describe as ‘transactional’”.

She said this means that some online pharmacies have “significantly high volumes of prescribing of high-risk medications … in a phenomenally short amount of time”.

Gittins added that some online pharmacies presented issues around leadership and governance, where “some organisations were deliberately trying to circumvent existing arrangements in place by registering, for example, overseas”.

Since January 2021, healthcare regulators have been calling for the government to close a regulatory loophole that allows UK patients to access prescription medicines online from prescribers who are based overseas.

In evidence submitted to the Health and Social Care Select Committee in April 2021, the Care Quality Commission warned that it had “current examples of death and severe harm caused by digital services delivered from outside England”.

In September 2024, the GPhC consulted on changes to its guidance for online pharmacies, requiring pharmacies to have “two-way communication” with patients before prescribing medicines used for weight loss, and expanding the list for which additional safeguards should be used.