Introduction to Pharmacy Law Flashcards
What are the different types of law relevant for pharmacy?
- Statue Law
- Common Law
What is Statue Law?
- It is an act of parliament
- Can be public or private acts
- Pharmacy only affected by public acts of parliament eg. Medicines act, Misuse of Drugs Act
- Acts are usually called Primary Legislation
- Statutory Instruments (Can be in the form of regulations or orders) are secondary legislations
- Proposals for new legislations are called bills
- Before a bill is proposed, gov will usually signal its intentions with a white paper
- Often preceded nay a discussion document: green paper
Public Law
-Involves the state or government (Can be either statue law or common law):
Includes:
-Criminal law: defines the boundaries of acceptable conduct. Contravening criminal law means an offence against society and is punishable by state
What is a crime?
-An act of violation of criminal law made with criminal intent
Criminal Law
-Crown prosecution service makes decision to prosecute someone alleged to have committed an offence
What is MHRA?
Government agency responsible for enforcing medicines legislations in the UK
- Able to bring criminal prosecutions in cases such as unlawful manufacture, supply or promotion of meds
- GPhC can also prosecute for certain types of provisions of medicines offences
What is administrative law?
Controls how public bodies and individuals, including the NHS and community pharmacy contractors should operate eg. NHS dispensing contract Terms of Service
What is professional Law?
- Law allowing discipling of eg. health professionals
- GPhc is constituted in statutory law
- Pharmacist and pharmacy technicians order 2007 gives GPhC the power to discipline pharmacists and technicians
What is “Standard of care”?
yardstick to judge in a professional tribunal if a pharmacist is guilty of professional misconduct
Common law
- Common law related to duties and obligations between citizen and is built up of court judgements to create a body of decisions and precedents known as civil law
- Common law relates to specific circumstances when legislation does not exist or apply
- for example: a pharmacist has a common law duty of care to their patients and the public
Civil Law
-Concerned with disputes between individuals or organisations regarding duties, rights and obligations. Eg. Property, law of contract, negligence
What is a tort?
A wrongful act committed against another person, intentional or not
- It derives from the notion that citizens owe each other duties and responsibilities
- In healthcare practice- common are breach of confidence, defamation and negligence
What occurs in a civil case?
Complaint makes an allegation that the actions of another person has caused them damage or injury
-complainant has to prove their case “on the balance of probabilities” i.e its more likely than not that the other person did cause the harm
What is an example of negligence?
- Supplying the wrong drug to a patient who suffers harm as a result of that error
- a doctor prescribing too high of a dose and the pharmacist dispenses it
What is involved proving negligence?
-Duty: That a duty was owed to the patient in the particular situation
-Breach: that the professional breached this duty in failing to conform to the standard of care required by law
=Causation: that the patient suffered harm (that was not too remote) as a result of the defendants actions
What Year did The Human Rights Act come out?
1998
What does the Human Rights Act 1998 incorporate?
- Requires all public bodies (like courts, police, local authorities, hospitals and publicly funded schools) and other bodies carrying out public functions to respect and protect your human rights
- All UK laws must be interpreted to respect and protect the human rights of all UK citizens
- Act sets out human rights in a series of ‘Articles’ Each article deals with a different right
Examples of Articles
Article 2: Right to life
Article 6: Right to a fair trial
Article 5: Right to liberty and security
The Courts- Criminal
1) Magistrates Court: hears less serious criminal cases, can’t impose sentences of imprisonment > 12 months
2) Crown Court: Hears cases and appeals from magistrate’s court, has greater powers of sentencing, deals with minor and serious crimes
3) Divisional Court: Queens Bench Division
4) Court of Appeal, Criminal Division
5) Supreme Court- Highest Court in /England
The Courts - Civil
1) County Court- 1 Judge, no jury. smalls comes of money eg. personal injury, discrimination
2) High Court- hears more major cases of negligence, also appeals for pharmacists
3) Court of Appeal
4) Supreme Court
The Courts- Tribunals
- NHS tribunals who administer administrative law
- power to enforce rests with administrative body rather than police or criminal courts
- Other tribunals include employment and education law
- FTP panels of the GPHc are a form of professional tribunal
Types of Offences
- Indictable Offences: More serious crimes and are tried in the Crown Court by a judge or jury
- Summary Offences: Less serious and are tried in the magistrates courts
- Triable-either-way offences: those that are under the circumstances are triable as summary indictable offences (or both)
What is an example of a triable-either-way-offence?
-Contravening the human medicines regulations such as when selling a pharmacy medicine from a registered pharmacy in the absence of a pharmacist, would be a criminal offence and is triable either way (either a fine or imprisonment or both)
Criminal Penalties (Sentencing)
- Discharges: Most lenient sentence available to criminal court for minor offences
- Fines; most common
- Community Orders: eg. Community service or supervision, alcohol or drug treatment orders
- Custodial sentences i.e prison
- Warning/Cautions eg. by police
