Good Pharmacy Practice
What the exam tests
GPP questions are situational: a prescription arrives, a patient asks for something else, the fridge fails, a child is dispensed an adult dose. The exam wants the pharmacist's legal and professional duty, in order, plus the record that proves it happened.
Core duties
- Validity of the prescription: prescriber qualification, date, drug, strength, dose, duration, signature. Clarify rather than guess.
- Counselling: dose, frequency, route, food, storage, key side effects, what to do about a missed dose, and when to return.
- Substitution only within the law and with patient consent; a cheaper brand is not automatically a legal substitute, and narrow-therapeutic-index drugs need particular care.
- Storage and cold chain: refrigerator 2–8 °C with a temperature log, no food, no freezing; ambient stock protected from heat, light and moisture.
- Records: prescriptions retained, purchase and sale records traceable batch by batch, and a narcotics register kept for inspection.
- Reporting: adverse drug reactions, quality defects and suspected falsified products go to the authority, not merely back to the supplier.
Worked example
A patient presents a prescription for a narrow-therapeutic-index medicine and asks for 'the same thing, cheaper'. Correct handling: confirm the prescription is complete and valid; explain that substitution requires prescriber or protocol authority and patient agreement; if permitted, dispense, counsel on the different appearance and strength so the patient does not double-dose, and record the substitution.
Traps
Counselling only when asked; storing vaccines in a domestic fridge with no logs; accepting a prescription with a missing strength and 'working it out'; dispensing antibiotics for a viral cold on request; failing to record narcotics transactions.