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The founder-director of an online dispensing company has been suspended for five months after admitting to forging another pharmacist’s signatures on the responsible pharmacist register so he could complete locum shifts elsewhere.

Rashedur Robb Khan, who launched online pharmacy MyMeds in 2019 after six years as a community pharmacy locum, struggled with slow growth in the early days of the business with as few as 200-300 prescriptions per month.

After hiring a locum to work on Wednesdays so he himself could carry out locum shifts elsewhere to help bring in money for the business, the superintendent pharmacist found he was “still short of money” according to the GPhC’s report of Mr Khan’s recent fitness to practise hearing.

To earn more cash he agreed to take on another shift on Thursdays, but found himself unable to find cover for between 2pm and 6pm on those days in his own business.

Mr Khan approached a pharmacist he knew to take on the shift but this individual – referred to in the FtP report as Person A – replied that he was unable to work on Thursday afternoons. 

Despite this, Mr Khan decided to undertake the Thursday locum shifts and “falsify his own record” to show that Person A was working at MyMeds as the responsible pharmacists on those days, the FtP committee found.

This carried on “for 14 consecutive Thursdays between May 28, 2020 and August 27, 2020,” according the FtP hearing report. Person A was unaware his name was being used in this way. 

After receiving a tip-off, a GPhC inspector visited the pharmacy on November 11, 2021 and saw the records Mr Khan had falsified. 

He initially denied that the records had been falsified, and then in October 2023 had his solicitors write to the GPhC claiming that while he accepted responsibility for the fact the pharmacy had opened without a RP present, the blame laid with his non-pharmacist business associate. 

However, on July 13, 2025 he signed a statement accepting full responsibility for falsifying the RP records and admitting he had acted dishonestly. 

He also admitted having signed himself in on the RP register for two days in September 2020 when he was travelling to Istanbul with his wife and no RP was present at the pharmacy. 

Accounting for his conduct, Mr Khan told the FtP committee he had failed to “fully analyse the seriousness of his actions” and had “persuaded himself at the time that there was little danger to patients because the pharmacy was dispensing so few prescriptions and he gave strict instructions to his associate not to issue prescriptions in his absence”. This was later confirmed by the GPhC. 

He also said he had sought to minimise any risk to patients by attending the pharmacy early in the morning to ensure all prescriptions “were dealt with before he left to work as a locum at the community pharmacy”. 

He told the committee he was “ashamed of what he had done” and provided evidence of CPD and personal reflection that had taken place since the events came to light. 

His solicitor also gave evidence that Mr Khan was facing a crisis in his business and personal life and had brought the offending behaviour to an end of his own volition before it came to the regulator’s attention. 

Mr Khan said that as the pharmacy has grown to a 9,000-scripts-per-month business with several employees, his perspective has changed from when he was initially working in isolation from other health professionals. 

The FtP committee, which acknowledged that he had reflected on his actions and did not pose any threat to the public, decided on a five-month suspension order to reflect the seriousness of Mr Khan’s behaviour while also taking into account mitigating factors such as his previously unblemished record and his personal difficulties at the time in question.

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