Medicines counter assistants

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain s Professional Standards and Guidance for the Sale and Supply of Medicines ((2) Supply of Over The Counter (OTC) Medicines) states that When purchasing medicines from pharmacies patients expect to be provided with high quality, relevant information in a manner they can easily understand. With this in mind, whenever P medicines are sold from a pharmacy the sale must be made under the supervision of a pharmacist. All medicines counter assistants who regularly deal with requests for medicines must be trained. The training of assistants in pharmacies should be such that they will request information from the purchaser to ensure that the condition is suitable for self-medication and the product requested by the patient or suggested by the assistant is appropriate. Examples of suitable questions can be found in Section 8.2.1. 

In addition to the licensing conditions, the RPSGB recommends the following good-practice measures in association with the over-the-counter sale of simvastatin Pharmacists should be involved in all initial sales but subsequent sales may be delegated to appropriately trained medicines counter assistants. 

A young woman is referred to you by your medicines counter assistant. The assistant says that she saw the woman looking at self-service foot treatments and when the assistant asked if she could help, the woman said she was looking for something to treat a callus for her grandmother, In response to your questions, the woman tells you that her grandmother is 76 years old and is a non-insulin-dependent diabetic, What would your advice be ... 

A woman asks your medicines counter assistant for malathion shampoo for head lice. Your standard operating procedure for sales of P medicines instructs staff to refer to the pharmacist all requests for this product, which your assistant does. When you ask the woman why she wants it, she says that she has received a letter from her 6-year-old daughter s school that some children there have been found to have head lice. She is pretty sure that her daughter does not have them but wants to use the shampoo on all the family to make sure that they do not get them, How do you respond to her request ... 

A young woman is referred to you by your medicines counter assistant, as she has picked up a General Sales List alkalinising treatment for cystitis but she tells your assistant she has not used such a product before. The client says that she thinks she has cystitis, but when you ask her if she has had cystitis before she says no, but she has talked about her symptoms to a friend who has had cystitis, and her friend thinks that this is what it is. In response to your questions, the symptoms she describes are urine not being passed more frequently than normal, but dark with an unpleasant smell pain about halfway up her back on both sides, and she has been feeling feverish since she woke up this morning. 

You are called by your medicines counter assistant to talk to a young woman who wants to buy a fluconazole capsule but has not had it before. When you ask her why she wants it she says that she thinks she has thrush. When you ask her how she knows, she says because her friend has told her that s what it must be. When you ask her to describe her symptoms more fully, she tells you that for the past 2 days she has had intense itching inside and outside her vagina. She also has a thick, creamy discharge, but there is no unpleasant odour. She experiences some burning on the outside when she passes water, but otherwise feels well with no fever or other symptoms, but she hasjust got over a nasty throat infection and about a week ago had a prescription for amoxicillin dispensed at your pharmacy. Will you sell her the fluconazole ... 

Pharmacy (P) medicines (see Section 1.3.2) may be sold from pharmacies under the supervision of a pharmacist. The pharmacist or the pharmacy technician/counter assistant... 

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