General Pharmaceutical Council joins the ESR Professional Bodies Interface
In December 2021 the Professional Bodies interface began processing records for the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC).
An ESR interface has been processing updates to ESR records for professionals registered with the General Medical Council (GMC), the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), the General Dental Council (GDC) and the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) for several years. There are approximately 26,000 registered pharmacy professionals, defined as Pharmacists and Pharmacy Technicians, recorded in ESR, employed across 332 NHS organisations. The addition of the GPhC to the existing Professional Bodies interface ensures that all of these employing authorities are kept informed about registration changes for pharmacy professionals, as they are with other professionals. As a result of the implementation in December 2021, the 26,000 records within ESR were checked and updated where appropriate.
Data from the GPhC register is used to verify the professional registration details of applicants and employees already recorded in ESR and to advise the appropriate individuals at employer level of any changes to those registration details. This facilitates accurate employment check information for applicants and compliance and safe clinical practice of Pharmacy professionals employed within the NHS.
Enabling Proactive Management of GPHC Professional Registration Records
Deployment of the interface saves trusts time in managing records and notifies them of changes that they may otherwise be unaware of, or would require additional manual activity to check.
Automatic Updates of the Professional Registration Record
Key changes to the GPhC record, such as Registration Status and Fitness to Practice issues, are updated within ESR by the interface capability - following a change to the GPhC Register. Employing Organisations can benefit from a number of automatic daily updates to the following data items, where the information is not already reflected in ESR.
Notifications direct to ESR users
Where the ESR ‘Pharmacy Prof Registration’ role holder has been assigned, the following notifications are received to assist with managing ESR records for pharmacy professionals.
Update Notification
Where a full match is made on the matching criteria when comparing the ESR person record with the Professional Body details, the ESR Professional Body record is updated, and a notification is sent to the role holder highlighting the new details. These notifications will be colour coded in Red, Amber and Green to easily highlight the urgency of each update. Full details can be found in the GPhC FAQ here.
Matching criteria for GPhC: Professional Registration Number, First Name and Last Name.
Decision Notification
Where there is a mismatch on First Name or Last Name, but the Professional registration number matches, this notification is sent to the role holder asking them to confirm whether the details for the person are correct. If the role holder accepts the match, then the Professional Registration changes are applied to the Professional Registration record.
Data Cleanse Notification
In addition to the Update Notification and the Decision Notification, a Workflow notification is generated weekly which lists invalid, erroneous and incorrectly assigned registration numbers. The notification lists registration numbers that have been found to have an invalid format or assigned to incorrect individual(s). The receiver of the notification is asked to check with the GPhC Public Register and update any registrant information as appropriate.
Registrations Expiry Notification
In line with the other professional bodies, GPhC registrants and their supervisor’s benefit from the existing Registration Expiry Notifications. Please refer to the ESR-NHS0060 – Workflow Notifications Guide for full details.
Where can I find more information?
The FAQ document is available on the ESR Hub.
The ESR User Manual (accessible via the ESR Hub) has also been updated to reflect the addition of the GPhC.
The GPhC has a wealth of information on their website which may assist users and the register is publicly available. The link to their website is here: https://www.pharmacyregulation.org/.
If you need the assistance of the NHSBSA ESR Team, please raise a Service Request on the ESR Service Desk where a member of the Support Team will be more than happy to help.