What the pharmacy score measures
A pharmacy score is a regulatory record, not a customer rating. It combines the outcomes the General Pharmaceutical Council published after inspecting a pharmacy with a live check that the pharmacy remains on the register. It reports how that business performed against the regulator’s five inspection principles. It says nothing about delivery speed or how good the service felt, and no pharmacy can pay to improve its score or to climb our table.
With an established treatment you have other signals to fall back on. Years of customer accounts, forum threads, a settled sense of which providers do this well. Foundayo has none of that yet, because in August 2026 it barely existed in the UK. Everyone dispensing it is doing so for the first time.
That absence is exactly why the inspection record earns its place here. It does not describe how a pharmacy handles Foundayo, because no inspector has yet assessed anyone on a medicine this new. It describes something more durable: whether the business has the governance, the staffing and the procedures to handle any medicine properly. In a brand new market, that is the closest thing to evidence you can get.
What we will not put in it
No star ratings, no aggregated sentiment, no editorial favourites. Dayo publishes no figure it cannot attribute to a regulator or verify itself.
The five GPhC inspection principles
Inspectors judge a registered pharmacy against five principles. Here is each in plain language, and what it means when the medicine in question launched a fortnight ago.
1 Governance
Does the pharmacy identify and manage risk? Do staff follow the written procedures? Is confidentiality maintained, are the legally required records kept, is safeguarding handled, and are dispensing mistakes recorded and learned from?
2 Staff
Do staff hold the qualifications and skills the services require? Is their knowledge kept up to date? Can they raise concerns and suggest improvements freely?
3 Premises
Are the premises clean, maintained and suitable for the volume of work? Is there a private area for speaking with a pharmacist?
4 Services, including medicines management
Are services accessible? Are medicines sourced, stored and managed safely? Are people on high-risk medicines identified and advised?
5 Equipment and facilities
Does the pharmacy have the equipment it needs, is it maintained, and is it used so that confidentiality is protected?
The nine standards for pharmacy professionals
Where the five principles judge the business, nine standards apply to the individuals inside it. In the regulator’s own wording, pharmacy professionals must:
- Provide person-centred care
- Work in partnership with others
- Communicate effectively
- Maintain, develop and use professional knowledge and skills
- Use professional judgement
- Behave in a professional manner
- Respect and maintain the person’s confidentiality and privacy
- Speak up when they have concerns or when things go wrong
- Demonstrate leadership
The first and the fifth carry particular weight in weight loss services. Person-centred care and professional judgement both require the clinical decision to serve the person being assessed rather than the commercial interest of the business. In practice that means a prescriber must be willing to turn down a sale.
Keep that standard in mind when you encounter a countdown timer sitting next to a prescription decision, encouragement to move up a dose faster than planned, a subscription that proves far harder to leave than to join, or an assessment that appears built to be passed. None of this proves anything about any particular provider, and none of it is an allegation against anyone we list. They are simply things you are entitled to notice, and to weigh, before deciding who to trust.
Reading an inspection report: a worked example
A headline outcome compresses a lot of detail. What follows is a real published report we have anonymised, naming no pharmacy. All five principles were marked standards met. Two observations in the body still deserve attention.
The headline
Standards met across all five principles, no action required. On any comparison table that reads as a clean pass.
The detail
- Dispensing errors were logged, but the records did not capture why they had happened. The pharmacy had the mechanism and was using it. What was absent was cause. Without causes there is no pattern to spot and no improvement to make, and the report treated that as an opportunity missed rather than a failure.
- The dispensing area was described as small for the volume of work passing through it. Not unsafe on the day and not a breach, so the outcome held. It is exactly the observation that grows teeth when a pharmacy takes on a fast-growing new treatment.
What to take from it: standards met sets a floor, not a ceiling. Two pharmacies with identical headlines can operate very differently underneath. Read each principle in full, and treat remarks about capacity, volume and learning from error as the most revealing lines in the document.
Using the pharmacy score filter
On the Dayo comparison table the score appears next to the price, so you can see at a glance whether the cheapest listing is also a well-run pharmacy. The two are independent measures, which is why displaying them together is worth doing.
Worth knowing: an inspection record attaches to the pharmacy, not to the product. The same registered premises may dispense Foundayo, injectable treatments and conventional prescriptions under one set of procedures and one inspection. The score you see here is therefore the score that pharmacy carries throughout our network:
- Monj uses it against Mounjaro prices
- iGovy uses it against Wegovy injection prices
- Ogovy uses it against Wegovy pill prices
Swap the medicine and the inspection record stays put.
What a pharmacy score cannot tell you
A measure worth trusting states its own limits, so here are ours.
It is one day, recorded and published
Inspections happen at a moment in time. Staff, volumes and premises move on afterwards. The score reflects the most recently published inspection, which may not be recent, and for a medicine launched in 2026 no inspection anywhere yet reflects how a pharmacy handles Foundayo specifically.
It tells you nothing about service
Delivery, packaging, whether anyone answers an email, how a refund is handled: none of it is inspected. Customer reviews on a platform such as Trustpilot are better evidence for those questions than anything we publish, and pretending otherwise would not serve you.
Closing that gap is the aim of pharmacy-score.co.uk, a separate community project now in development. It is intended to let patients rate and review pharmacies from their own experience, which is precisely the evidence a regulator’s file cannot contain. It has not launched, and it is distinct from the score explained on this page.
It cannot see how prescribing decisions are really made
Whether an assessment process is quietly built to approve almost everyone is not observable from outside, and no inspection outcome will tell you.
It is not medical advice
A score recommends neither a pharmacy nor a treatment. Dayo does not sell, prescribe or dispense medicines. Whether Foundayo is suitable for you is a matter for a registered prescriber.
Verify a pharmacy yourself in four minutes
None of this asks for your trust. The regulator publishes the underlying material free of charge, and the check takes roughly four minutes.
- Find the GPhC registration number on the website. Legitimate UK online pharmacies show it, normally in the footer or on an about page. If there is none, the check ends there.
- Search that number on the GPhC register. Use the regulator’s register of pharmacies and confirm the trading name and address returned match the site you are on. A mismatch is the most valuable red flag available.
- Read the inspection report principle by principle. Skip past the headline. With a new medicine, pay closest attention to governance and to staffing, since those determine whether the pharmacy can take on unfamiliar work safely.
- Confirm a prescriber must approve supply. Foundayo is prescription-only. Any service prepared to supply it without a proper clinical assessment has answered the question for you.
Our own vetting is set out in Dayo Verified pharmacies, and how to spot a fake pharmacy covers the warning signs in more depth.
Pharmacy score FAQ
How does a pharmacy score differ from a Trustpilot rating?
Different sources, different questions. Trustpilot gathers what customers experienced afterwards. A pharmacy score reports what an inspector observed on the premises against five regulatory principles. One tells you how the business is run, the other how it treats customers, and both are worth a look.
How can I tell whether an online pharmacy selling Foundayo is legitimate?
Take its GPhC registration number, search it on the GPhC register, and check the trading name and address match the website. Then confirm that nothing can be supplied without a prescriber approving it. Because Foundayo is new and in demand, be especially wary of any site offering it without a consultation.
Do the best-inspected pharmacies charge the most for Foundayo?
No. There is no link between the two. Inspection outcomes come from a regulator and prices come from a commercial decision, and in our table strong inspection records turn up at the cheapest end as readily as anywhere else.
Can a pharmacy buy a better pharmacy score from Dayo?
It cannot. The score comes from published regulatory outcomes that we neither generate nor influence, and ranking follows the price data. No commercial relationship changes either, and we have declined arrangements proposed on that basis.
How current is a pharmacy score?
The registration check runs as part of routine pharmacy checks, so a lapsed registration is caught quickly. The inspection portion changes only when the GPhC publishes a new report for that pharmacy, which happens on the regulator’s schedule rather than ours.
Price and inspection record, together
With a medicine this new, the cheapest listing and the best-run pharmacy are both worth knowing. The table shows both.
See Foundayo prices with pharmacy scoresRelated guides
Sources. General Pharmaceutical Council inspection principles and standards for pharmacy professionals, and the Foundayo Summary of Product Characteristics for the interaction points referenced above. The worked example comes from a genuine published inspection report and has been anonymised: no pharmacy is named and no identifying detail appears.
Dayo is an independent price comparison index operated by Medstack Ltd, company number 16439872, registered in England and Wales. We do not sell, prescribe or dispense medicines, and nothing on this page is medical advice.