Retail Pharmacy Editing and Proofreading Services

Everything a pharmacist says at the counter is gone by the time the patient reaches the car park. What survives is a label on a box, printed in a hurry, read at home by somebody who was not concentrating in the shop and is now trying to remember whether it was one tablet or two, with food or without, and whether the tiredness is the tablets or the flu.

We edit what pharmacies and pharmacy groups produce — dispensing label directions and standard wording, counselling point summaries and patient handouts, medicines use review and consultation documentation, new medicine service material, patient group direction documentation, over-the-counter advice and referral guidance, repeat prescription and ordering communications, service descriptions for vaccination, testing and screening, care home and domiciliary medicines documentation, controlled drug and safeguarding procedures, and staff standard operating procedures. Our editors work on the words the patient reads at home.

The dispensing label and its counselling points are the only part of a consultation that goes home, and their failure is compression into abbreviations that made sense to the person typing. "1 T.D.S. P.C." is a professional instruction printed on a patient's box. We work through these and the standard wording behind them so directions are written as an instruction a person follows — how many, how often, at what times of day, and with or without food — since "three times a day" is interpreted as breakfast, lunch and bedtime by some people and as every eight hours by others, and for some medicines that matters; so anything time-critical is expressed as a time or an interval rather than a frequency; so the single most important counselling point is printed rather than only spoken, because a warning about a serious interaction that exists only in the pharmacist's memory of a conversation has not been given; so the reason for the medicine is included where the patient agrees, given that people with eight boxes cannot always say which is which; so the common early side effect and what to do about it is on the label or the attached note, as this is why people stop taking things in week one; and so the wording is consistent across the label, the bag label and any handout. Labels written this way are the difference between a medicine dispensed and a medicine taken.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including procedures, patient material and service documentation. We are editors rather than pharmacists or clinical advisers, and we offer no view on directions, clinical appropriateness or professional standards. What we can do is make the label work in the kitchen.