The Development Sites Experience

In July 2012 the RPS Professional Standards for Hospital Pharmacy Services: Optimising patient outcomes from medicines were launched. These 10 overarching standards which have been developed by a wide range of stakeholders across GB cover pharmacy services delivered by acute, mental health, private and community service providers. These standards aim to ensure that patients receive a high quality pharmacy service, from admission through to discharge across multiple care pathways and underpin the patient experience, and the safe, effective management of medicines within and across organisations

To help refine the standards in practice and inspire others by sharing their experiences a group of thirty five ‘development sites’ across Great Britain (see appendix 1) have been putting the standards into practice resulting in the following report. This report is a distillation of experiences from the development sites and comprises three sections:

  • SECTION 2 of the report shares insights from the sites about their experience of using the standards and gives some pointers to teams who want to start out on the process.
  • SECTION 3 looks at each standard by its dimensions and gives some examples of how the development sites illustrated that they were meeting the standards along with the actions and gaps that they identified. The section is supplemented by some practice examples.
  • SECTION 4 contains RPS recommendations for action, our ‘top topics’ that we are encouraging hospitals to give focus to in the next year.
  • APPENDIX 2 contains examples of practice from across the development sites that support delivery of different dimensions of the standards

Before reading this report from the development sites, we recommend that you familiarise yourself with the RPS Professional Standards for Hospital Pharmacy Services.

Patient experience Patient experience



Safe & effective use of medicines Safe & effective use of medicines




Delivering the service Delivering the service