From admission through to discharge, across multiple care pathways, and in a range of settings, (e.g. acute hospitals, in the community, homecare provision), patients access hospital pharmacy services.

To ensure that patients experience a consistent quality of hospital pharmacy services, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) has defined ten overarching professional standards. These standards, (applicable across the full range of service providers in Great Britain) will help ensure patients are protected from incidents of avoidable harm and get the best outcomes from their medicines.

The ten overarching standards give:

• Chief executives, board members and other stakeholders a framework against which they can be assured  that there is adequate professional input into how medicines are used, and that the appropriate level and quality of pharmacy services are provided within their organisation and their partners.  
• Chief pharmacists and their teams a consistent set of standards to use as a framework for continuous service improvement and innovation, both in their own organisations and with partners who deliver local health services.

The standards are consistent with, and may be used to help inform and complement, relevant legal framework requirements and the minimum standards currently required by systems regulators, professional regulators and insurers.

To support implementation, we have developed a range of supporting resources and are working a number of volunteer development sites to evaluate the standards in practice and help build an evidence base.

We will continue to widely engage with other national organisations, within and outside of pharmacy, to promote the standards and support the continued development of high quality hospital pharmacy services.

Contributors

We worked in close partnership with a wide range of organisations and individuals and we are grateful for their contributions and expertise. Find out more the contributors to the standards.