Over 1,000 pharmacies sign up to Daffodil end-of-life standards
More than 1,000 pharmacies across the UK have now signed up to the Daffodil Standards, a set of benchmarks designed to improve end-of-life care delivered through community pharmacy. The figure — 1,060 pharmacies in total — marks a significant uptake for a programme still relatively new to the sector.
What happened
The total number of pharmacies signed up to the Daffodil Standards has reached 1,060, according to Chemist+Druggist. Ellen Gault of Daly's Pharmacy, one of the participating sites, described the impact on her team and patients as "a real difference".
The Daffodil Standards set out what good end-of-life and palliative care support looks like from a pharmacy perspective. Pharmacies that sign up commit to training staff, improving communication with patients and families, and making sure that medicines — including anticipatory medicines used in the final days of life — are reliably available and dispensed with care.
Why it matters
End-of-life care sits at the edge of what community pharmacy traditionally sees itself as doing. Most training programmes cover acute and long-term conditions in depth. Palliative care gets less formal attention, yet the medicines involved — strong opioids, anxiolytics, antiemetics, antisecretory agents — require exactly the kind of careful dispensing and patient-centred communication that pharmacists are trained for.
For a pre-reg trainee or newly qualified pharmacist working in a community setting, encountering a patient or carer managing someone's final weeks at home is not a rare event. Prescriptions for palliative care medicines, queries about syringe drivers, anxious family members asking about doses or side effects — these situations happen. And when they do, the consultation skills and clinical knowledge that underpin them are the same skills assessed throughout the GPhC registration process.
The Daffodil Standards give pharmacies a framework for thinking about this systematically rather than handling each case from scratch. For any pharmacist working in one of the 1,060 signed-up sites, that framework shapes day-to-day practice. And even for those at pharmacies that haven't signed up, understanding what the standards are asking pharmacies to do is useful professional context.
Ellen Gault's comment that the standards have made "a real difference" is worth holding onto. Frameworks like this tend to matter most not when everything is going smoothly but when a consultation is difficult — when a carer is distressed, when a prescription for a Schedule 2 controlled drug arrives late on a Friday afternoon, when a patient wants to talk and the pharmacy is busy. Having thought about end-of-life care in advance, as the Daffodil Standards ask teams to do, means pharmacists are less likely to be caught flat-footed.
There's also a broader workforce point here. Pharmacy's role in palliative care has historically been underrecognised. An uptake of 1,060 pharmacies signals that community pharmacy is actively staking a claim to this space — not waiting to be invited in by other health professions but setting its own standards and committing to them publicly.
GPhC exam relevance
The GPhC Common Registration Assessment tests applied knowledge across a range of clinical and professional domains. Palliative care medicines appear in that mix. Morphine sulfate, oxycodone, midazolam, haloperidol, levomepromazine, hyoscine hydrobromide — these are medicines pre-reg candidates are expected to know. Not just their names, but their indications in palliative contexts, their routes of administration, their legal classification, and the counselling points that matter when dispensing them.
Controlled drug requirements come up repeatedly in assessment contexts. A prescription for a Schedule 2 drug like morphine or oxycodone has specific legal requirements for validity — hand-written or computer-generated, specific wording, appropriate quantities. Getting these wrong in practice has consequences. Getting them wrong in an assessment question costs marks.
Palliative care scenarios also test communication skills. The GPhC's standards for pharmacy professionals ask registrants to communicate clearly and listen to patients and carers. An assessment scenario involving a distressed carer collecting a palliative prescription, or a patient asking about their pain medicines, is testing whether a candidate can apply those standards under pressure — not just whether they know the drug name.
The Daffodil Standards don't appear directly in the GPhC blueprint. But the clinical territory they cover does. Knowing that 1,060 pharmacies have now signed up to a formalised end-of-life care framework is a prompt to check whether your own knowledge of palliative medicines, CD requirements, and patient communication in sensitive consultations is as solid as your knowledge of, say, antihypertensives or statins.
If there are gaps, fill them now. The BNF's palliative care section is detailed and well-organised. The NICE guideline on care of dying adults in the last days of life (NG31) covers anticipatory prescribing and the medicines most commonly used. Both are worth reading with a focus on the pharmacist's role specifically.
What's next
Watch for whether the Daffodil Standards uptake continues to grow and whether any formal integration with NHS England or devolved health service contracting frameworks follows. If end-of-life care support becomes a recognised pharmacy service — commissioned rather than voluntary — it would change the professional and contractual landscape considerably.
For now, if you're on placement or working in a community pharmacy, ask whether the site has signed up. If it has, read the standards. If it hasn't, the standards are still publicly available and worth reviewing as a guide to what good palliative care pharmacy practice looks like.
And if you haven't looked at palliative care medicines in depth recently, do it before your assessment date.
Source: Chemist+Druggist — https://www.chemistanddruggist.co.uk/news/exclusive-1060-pharmacies-sign-up-to-daffodil-standards-5HOQ3TPNVJG5VPPBURFE62RQH4/