In October 2023, the CQC published their 2022/23 State of Care Report, which looked at the state of health care and adult social care in England. It was a mixed picture, and although it found some excellent work in very difficult circumstances, it also identified multiple areas in which improvement was needed.

One such area was around controlled drugs and adult social care providers. The CQC asked registered adult social care providers to provide information about whether they administer controlled drugs. Of the providers that responded:

• 67% (13,501) of services (20,184) said they administered controlled drugs
• of the services that administer controlled drugs, 17% (2,248) reported controlled drugs incidents in the previous 12 months

There are many reasons for this, but in particular the CQC highlighted issues with Virtual Wards:

“Often, pharmacy teams were not involved in setting up a virtual ward from the outset, so they had no influence in decisions on the use and supply of medicines. Sometimes there was no allocated budget for pharmacy staffing, which meant leadership often fell to a trust’s chief pharmacist without any additional resource, resulting in policy, practice, and governance of medicines being overlooked.”

The CQC also noted the importance of “Collaborative working, improvement and shared learning: To improve medicines optimisation in virtual wards, providers identified the need for leaders to collaborate and share learning across systems, and to involve pharmacy teams from the start. We are continuing to collaborate with stakeholders and providers to drive improvements in this type of setting.”

This is one area among many where it is crucial that staff know about the policies and procedures which govern how they manage medicines. As the care sector is constantly trying to innovate and move to easier or smarter systems, compliance will become more important than ever in ensuring staff know what the right thing to do is.

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