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An online pharmacist who frequently made “transactional” prescribing decisions after less than a minute’s deliberation and who demonstrated “uncritical and total reliance” on web questionnaires when issuing high-risk medicines including propranolol has been suspended for a year by the General Pharmaceutical Council’s fitness to practise committee. 

Mohammed Habib was described as focused on “meeting targets” rather than patient care after he was found to have based prescribing decisions on questionnaire responses on 62,689 occasions, including 4,859 occasions where he prescribed high-risk medicines.

The hearing, which took place from January 27-February 4, concerned Mr Habib’s practice between November 2019 and July 2022 during which time he worked remotely for the now-defunct online pharmacy UK Meds before resigning. This included over a year spent as the company’s joint clinical lead. 

Among numerous allegations levelled against Mr Habib, he was found to have made safeguarding failures when he prescribed propranolol tablets to a psychiatric patient who subsequently committed suicide having sourced the drug from seven different online pharmacies.

There were also 20 instances where Mr Habib prescribed either amitriptyline or propranolol to patients who had previously received these drugs from UK Meds – including some instances where had issued the prescription himself.

An analysis of his prescribing uncovered 28,816 instances when he dealt with prescription requests in under a minute, 12,960 in under three minutes and 16,570 in five minutes or more.

After denying some of the allegations against him in a January 5 written statement, Mr Habib admitted to all of them during the FtP hearing and acknowledged that in his position as clinical lead he failed to speak up “when he knew things were not being conducted properly” by the company, which failed several GPhC inspections before removing itself from the register.

Mr Habib, who has worked as a pharmacist prescriber in a GP surgery for the last two years and made a “favourable impression” on colleagues, told the FtP committee he “accepted full responsibility for his actions and their potential consequences” and had been “naïve” to think the UK Meds prescribing model was safe for patients.

The FtP committee found his remorse was “sincere” but noted that his insight into his misconduct was “recent and incomplete” given that he had denied several allegations as late as January 5. 

The committee imposed a 12-month suspension order to demonstrate that it took his misconduct seriously and “to send a message how close the registrant had come to being removed from the register”.