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A pharmacist has been struck off the register after forging prescriptions and falsifying patient records to generate prescription requests.

A General Pharmaceutical Council fitness-to-practise hearing this month heard Stephen James Fleck created 16 handwritten prescriptions by forging a doctor’s signature while he worked at NHS Dorset Integrated Care Board and Dorset Healthcare University NHS Foundation Trust as senior clinical pharmacist.

Fleck received medicines after those prescriptions were sent to different pharmacies in the area. He also gained unauthorised access to patients’ data and falsified patient records to generate 43 prescription requests using the electronic prescription system, changing the nominated pharmacy and again receiving the medication.

Prescriptions that would be less likely to rouse suspicions

The hearing was told Fleck searched the practice’s clinical system to find patients whose “prescriptions would be less likely to rouse suspicions”. It heard the patients he fraudulently claimed for were over 60, did not pay for their prescriptions and were already receiving dihydrocodeine.

In total, Fleck accepted £785.45 worth of prescriptions he had created or generated fraudulently.

Prior to that, a patient who underwent a medication review with him handed him medicines including dihydrocodeine that were no longer needed and should have been destroyed. However, Fleck kept hold of those medicines.

He was suspended by the GPhC in September 2023 and pleaded guilty at Weymouth Magistrates’ Court of theft and forgery. In May last year, he was sentenced to 44 weeks in prison suspended for two years, told to complete 250 hours of unpaid work and pay costs.

This month's FtP hearing took into account the court’s view that Fleck’s behaviour had been “criminal” and the judge’s suggestion there had been a “breach of a high degree of trust as a pharmacist and also…some significant planning by the use of prescriptions…not only to obtain the drugs but also to hide (the criminality)”.

Planning and sophistication involving forging and falsely creating prescriptions 

The FtP committee said Fleck was guilty of “significant dishonesty which was sustained for a period of around nine months” and observed “a degree of planning and sophistication involving forging and falsely creating prescriptions to divert controlled drugs”.

The committee also said although no patient suffered any harm – Fleck had said in his oral evidence that he was “so relieved” his actions “led to no actual harm, so far as I know” – a risk of harm was “inherent in (his) misconduct” and there was “a high degree of breach of trust, including the misuse of patients’ personal data”.

Although Fleck had “personally stressed his remorse and shame”, the committee said patients “were put at risk as their medical records were falsified to assist and hide the registrant’s dishonest actions”.

“This was a serious breach of trust and the fundamental principles of the profession such that it brought the profession into disrepute and showed that the registrant’s integrity could no longer be relied upon,” the committee said.

It took into account Fleck’s co-operation with investigations, his guilty plea in court and that he had “engaged” with the FtP hearing but concluded the “appropriate and proportionate sanction” was to remove him from the register given the “seriousness of the matter”.