registered pharmacists and help them provide safe and effective care to patients. And we particularly want to acknowledge the considerable contribution to health services that provisionally registered pharmacists have made during this time.

We have continued holding registration assessments online this year. We also worked successfully with the Pharmaceutical Society of Northern Ireland (PSNI) to hold our first joint, common registration assessment for trainee pharmacists in all four countries of the UK.

We worked closely with the PSNI to make sure all the assessments were carried out at the same time across the United Kingdom to ensure a fair and robust process.

We will also be working with a new provider, BTL Group Ltd, to run the next common registration assessment in June 2022. As well as having a network of test centres across the UK and internationally, BTL has a computer-based testing platform, Surpass. This will allow candidates to take their registration assessment online. BTL has extensive experience of delivering services to a range of clients, including the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and the Royal College of Ophthalmology.

We paused routine pharmacy inspections during national lockdowns, and most recently in December 2021 to support the vaccine booster programme. We focused on supporting registered pharmacies with their arrangements and plans to help manage pressures and challenges during the pandemic. We also made inspectors available to help in this effort.

programme. We focused on supporting registered pharmacies with their arrangements and plans to help manage pressures and challenges during the pandemic. We also made inspectors available to help in this effort.

From 31 January 2022, our inspectors began visiting pharmacies that had previously not met all the standards. They focused on pharmacies with published inspection reports where a six-month re-inspection was due. Our inspectors are visiting these pharmacies to check whether they are meeting all the standards for registered pharmacies, and the inspector will produce a report for publication. We are also inspecting newly registered pharmacies that have not yet had an inspection.

Throughout the pandemic, we continued to act quickly on any information we received which suggested a risk to patient safety. We carried out ‘intelligence-led’ inspections of these pharmacies. This meant we could focus our resources in areas which posed a higher risk to patient safety.

Examples of good practice during the pandemic, as identified by our inspectors, continue to be shared on our knowledge hub.

We continued to relax the revalidation requirements for pharmacy professionals because of the pandemic. Pharmacy professionals must usually submit six revalidation records every year. However, this