GPhC Fitness to Practise Concerns Up 35%: What It Means for Your Pharmacy
The GPhC's 2025/26 annual report landed this week, and one figure jumps out: fitness to practise concerns are up 35% on last year, sitting just under 10,000 for the first time. That's not a blip either, it's up 77% on where the number stood two years ago. About half of those concerns come from members of the public, which tells you something about the sector's visibility that inspections alone never quite capture.
What struck me reading it, having sat on the other side of this table in an old life, is how much of the story is in what doesn't reach a hearing. Ninety five per cent of concerns reaching initial triage get closed at that first stage, either outside the GPhC's remit entirely or not serious enough to question anyone's fitness to practise. Only 81 concerns made it as far as the FtP committee this year, and of those, 22 ended in removal from the register and 36 in suspension. So the volume is rising fast, but the proportion that actually escalates stays small. The gap between the two is where most of the useful lessons sit.
In my experience the concerns that do escalate rarely come down to a single dramatic failure. They come down to how a pharmacy responds once something has already gone wrong, whether there's a clear record of what was assessed and why, whether the SOP that should have caught the issue was actually followed on the day rather than just filed somewhere. Previously I wrote about the GPhC's updated inspection expectations around business continuity and transparency, and this report reads as the other half of that picture, showing what happens once a concern is raised rather than what an inspector checks on the day.
One thing worth flagging is the GPhC's own note about a sharp rise in lengthy AI-generated complaints. I'd guess this is only going to grow as complaint drafting gets easier, and it puts more pressure on regulators to triage efficiently without losing sight of the concerns that genuinely matter. It's not something a pharmacy can control from its end, but it's a reminder that the noise around genuine concerns is only going to increase, which makes having your own documentation and self-assessment in good order more important, not less.
The GPhC also carried out around 2,000 inspections this year, alongside over 5,500 instances of regulatory support and guidance. That's a lot of contact with the regulator that never makes the news. If your last self-audit or mock inspection is starting to feel like a while ago, this report is as good a prompt as any to revisit it before something else does it for you.
Source: Annual report 2025/26 | General Pharmaceutical Council
