The General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) has decided to discontinue its project of anonymising ethnicity data in fitness to practise cases after a pilot phase that ran from April 2023 to March 2024.
Council papers published on 22 April 2025 revealed that the project team recommended scrapping the initiative due to the substantial time and additional staff resources required for redaction, as well as the limited impact on mitigating bias in decision-making.
The pilot involved redacting information such as a registrant’s name, religion, and country of birth from case documents before they reached the Investigating Committee, which assesses evidence prior to referring cases to the fitness-to-practise committee.
Although a survey of affected registrants found that 59% felt the anonymisation made the process fairer, the overall analysis—limited by small case numbers—did not show clear benefits in addressing bias, noting that disparities were more evident at earlier stages of the process. Consequently, the GPhC has opted to focus future efforts on analyzing and addressing bias at the point when concerns are initially raised.
Council papers said:
“As the numbers are so small, it has been difficult to qualify the analysis from the pilot. Not all of the cases that have been through the IC have concluded at FtPC.
“In our broader analysis for the project year 2023–2024, we found higher proportions of referrals to the GPhC for male pharmacists, older pharmacists and those from ethnic minorities; however, once an investigation had been opened, these variances disappeared for ethnicity and age — although there remained an overrepresentation of male pharmacists under investigation and in receiving the more serious sanctions.”
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