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Community Pharmacy Patient Safety Group welcomes new Chair and Vice-Chair

The Community Pharmacy Patient Safety Group are delighted to announce the appointment of Jackie Giltrow as Chair and Jose Moss as Vice-Chair of the group respectively.

Jackie Giltrow BPharm, MRPharmS is the Medication Safety Officer and Clinical Governance Lead at Paydens Limited and an independent consultant specialising in risk management and patient safety in community pharmacy. She has been a member of the Community Pharmacy Patient Safety Group for nine years. Her career has spanned several roles. Jackie worked as Chief Inspector at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, where she was responsible for identifying and minimising risks to patient safety through comprehensive monitoring and inspection programmes. During a secondment at the Department of Health, Jackie assisted with the establishment of the General Pharmaceutical Council. She also chaired the Department’s Shipman monitoring and inspection subgroup. She has worked in a mixture of large multiples and small independents during her career in community pharmacy.

José Moss, BSc (Hons) PhD LLB (Hons) MBA CMgr FCMI MRPharmS FFRPS, is the Medication Safety Officer and Deputy Superintendent Pharmacist at Boots UK Limited. She has been a member of the Community Pharmacy Patient Safety Group since its inception. José has expertise in adverse incident management, pharmacy regulatory and clinical governance gained from a variety of support office roles within Boots UK. In her current position, José led the development of her employer’s current pharmacy incident and event reporting system that is used by over 2,000 UK community pharmacy teams. José also chairs the CCA’s Professional Practice Group and is a member of the Controlled Drugs National Patient Safety Group. Prior to joining Boots, José has worked in hospital pharmacy (where her career started as a student pharmacy technician), small independents and other large multiples (as a locum pharmacist whilst studying for her PhD and then as a pharmacy manager) in community practice.

The landscape of community pharmacy has evolved significantly since the Group’s launch. Organisations who are interested in joining the Group are actively encouraged to get in touch to learn more. This applies to organisations who, either through acquisition, or are themselves new to the market, have 50 or more community pharmacies. Three new members in January 2024, have grown membership of the group to 21 organisations.  

Since its inception, the Community Pharmacy Patient Safety Group has played an integral role in driving the patient safety agenda forward. This includes reducing Look-Alike-Sound-Alike errors, and other medication errors to advocating for an open and transparent approach to reporting, as well as sharing and learning from incidents.

Dr June Raine DBE, Chief Executive Officer, Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said: “Ten years on from the original MHRA and NHSE patient safety alert that prompted the formation of the Community Pharmacy Patient Safety Group, the MHRA is delighted to know that the Group continues to thrive. The Group is an invaluable asset not only in promoting patient safety in community pharmacy but in making a meaningful contribution, sharing and learning with the wider patient safety community, for example through campaigns like #MedSafetyWeek to encourage Yellow Card reporting”.

Jackie Giltrow, Chair of the Group said: “I am delighted to have been appointed as Chair of the Community Pharmacy Patient Safety Group. The Group is instrumental in promoting patient safety and driving improvements in community pharmacy. I’d like to thank Victoria Steele, my predecessor, for her commitment to the Group and her achievements as past Chair. I’m looking forward to building on the Group’s solid track record and to continuing its laser focus on patient safety in this new era of community pharmacy”.

Jose Moss, Vice-Chair of the Group said: “I am hugely passionate about patient safety and having been a member of the Community Pharmacy Patient Safety Group since its inception, thrilled to step into the role as Vice Chair. As community pharmacy continues to advance and provide more pharmacy services in addition to the core prescription dispensing and supply, it is essential that we work together across our organisations to put patient safety central to our work”.

ENDS

Notes to editors

  • The Community Pharmacy Patient Safety Group was first established in 2015 following an NHS Alert which recommended community pharmacy businesses to identify a Medication Safety Officer (MSO).
  • The original 2014 NHS Alert is here. Supporting information can be found here.
  • The Community Pharmacy Patient Safety Group provides a forum for large community pharmacy organisations (defined as 50 or more pharmacies in the MHRA alert), competitors in a commercial sense, to openly share and learn from each other when things go wrong, as well as from other sectors and industries. It is made up of the largest community pharmacy businesses, as well as organisations representing independent pharmacies and small multiples. The group works together to consider how learning from patient safety incidents can be applied across the pharmacy network and wider NHS, and then create the opportunities and resources to do just that.
  • The MSO role is undertaken by the NPA and Numark for independent pharmacies. The Group also includes an AIMp representative. 
  • MSOs took this requirement further and meet regularly to share and learn from patient safety incidents and drive improvements in patient care across community pharmacy and more widely. As part of its work, the group engages with a wide array of stakeholders including the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), NHS England (NHSE), the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC), and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS).
  • The group also feeds in annually to the Community Pharmacy England (CPE) discussions on the Pharmacy Quality Scheme, have helped make patient safety alerts clearer, supported the process of handling defective medicines, as well as inputting into the development of the national incident reporting system.
  • The Group is sponsored by the National Pharmacy Association (NPA) and hosted and supported by the CCA.