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Orders bringing rebalancing medicines legislation into effect are expected to be laid in Parliament before Christmas following minor changes made in light of the consultation process.

Ken Jarrold, chair of the Rebalancing Medicines Legislation and Pharmacy Regulation Programme Board, gave members of the All-Party Pharmacy Group a progress report at a meeting on October 13. He agreed that progress towards decriminalisation has been too slow, but said that this had been largely due to three factors:

• Delays related to the work of parliamentary counsel
• Processes involving regulatory impact and the regulatory policy committee
• His strong desire to achieve and maintain support for his plans among key stakeholders, especially bodies representing pharmacy.

While the legislation provides a statutory basis for the treatment of errors, Mr Jarrold explained that it should be regarded as a framework for the cultural and behavioural change that needed to follow. In particular, it was agreed that this must foster a strong culture of error reporting and learning from errors. APPG officers felt strongly that this had been hampered by the current legislative treatment of dispensing errors.

The defence that will be provided will cover single errors and honest mistakes. It will not cover unprofessional behaviour or errors that appear to form part of a pattern. 

It will cover all those in primary care who supply medicines. Separate consideration is to be given to the legislative provisions relating to dispensing errors in secondary care.

It was agreed that access by pharmacists and pharmacy teams to the Summary Care Record is a helpful development in this context, as it is expected to encourage and facilitate the detection and reporting of errors relating to medicines.

The defence is expected to apply across all the nations of the UK, although legislative processes will differ slightly in each.

It was agreed that the APPG would receive further updates on progress, or changes to plans. Its member stressed that they would be "disappointed and concerned" if there were to be any further delay, and that they would voice those concerns to ministers.