GPhC Fitness to Practise Cases Now Take Three Years to Resolve
I wrote recently about the rise in fitness to practise concerns reaching the GPhC, and the trend behind it. The Professional Standards Authority's annual review of the regulator, published at the end of September, puts some firmer numbers against what that pressure actually looks like from the inside, and it isn't a flattering picture on timeliness specifically.
The PSA found the GPhC met seventeen of its eighteen standards of good regulation for 2025/26, covering strengths across equality and diversity work, the quality of its fitness to practise investigations, and how it responded to emerging risks like online medicine supply. This is an improvement from previous years. But the one it failed, Standard 15 on timely case resolution, is the one that matters most if you or someone in your pharmacy ever ends up on the wrong end of a concern. The median time to resolve a case now sits at around one hundred and fifty six weeks, which is roughly three years, and this has been getting worse every year since 2018/19 rather than better. Three hundred and sixteen cases have been open for more than a year, and over half the cases waiting for a final hearing have been waiting more than three years.
I spent enough years on the other side to know what a long open case actually does to an individual, separate from whatever the outcome eventually turns out to be. It isn't just the uncertainty for the individual pharmacy professional involved, it's the governance drag on the business around them, deciding what you tell current or new employers, keeping your own records straight on what happened and when in case anyone asks three years later when memories have gone soft and staff have moved on. None of that gets any easier because the regulator itself is honest about being slow.
The GPhC's own response points to progress underneath the headline figure, cases now assessed within five weeks on average and most investigations wrapped up within forty, with a stated ambition to grow hearing capacity by half over the coming year. That's worth holding onto, because it suggests the backlog is a capacity problem working its way through rather than a system that's simply broken. But if you're the one with a concern sitting open against you or someone you know right now, a target for next year doesn't do much for the case you’re involved in today.
My own practical takeaway is that the paperwork and remediation discipline matters more the longer a case drags on, not less. Contemporaneous notes, a clear record of any support or supervision put in place once a concern is raised, and a straight answer ready about where things stand and why, all count for more three years into a case than they do in the first few weeks. I wrote about the volume side of this picture last month. This is the other half of it, and the half that's harder to fix with better triage alone.
I'd be curious whether the GPhC's capacity push actually closes that gap over the next year, or whether referral numbers keep outrunning it the way they have for the last few.
For more info:
PSA performance review of the GPhC, 2025/26: https://www.pharmacyregulation.org/about-us/news-and-updates/professional-standards-authority-publishes-gphc-performance-review-202526
Pharmaceutical Journal, "Regulator fails timely fitness-to-practise standard for eighth year running": https://pharmaceutical-journal.com/article/news/regulator-fails-timely-fitness-to-practise-standard-for-eighth-year-running
