A pharmacist who forged prescriptions worth more than £100,000 at his Keighley shop -- using GPs' signatures and the details of customers, including one who was dead -- has been struck off the register.

Trevor Sherlock, a pharmacist for 25 years, was convicted at Keighley Magistrates Court on October 13 last year following a guilty plea on three offences of making a fake instrument (the prescriptions) and three offences of false accounting.

On December 17, at Bradford Crown Court, he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment, concurrent on each offence. An additional 128 similar offences were taken into consideration.

Following the investigation Mr Sherlock paid back every penny of the £101,771.80, a disciplinary committee of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society was told.

Mr Sherlock, who owned the Aireworth Chemist, Aireworth Road, Keighley, forged more than 130 prescriptions and related claim forms between March 2001 and December 2002.

Mr Geoffrey Hudson, for the society, said Mr Sherlock had used customers' details and forged five doctors' signatures to push through prescriptions for expensive medication and claim the cash for it.

He got away with the scam after mistakenly being sent blank prescriptions from four local doctors surgeries along with forms for repeat prescriptions.

The NHS Pharmaceutical Fraud Team was alerted because Mr Sherlock -- who lives in Bradford -- had put through claims for a large number of high cost items.

Mr Sherlock has since sold his business, but during the investigation for the society, Mr Hudson said that the scanned signatures of five doctors -- which were used in the fraud -- were found on his computer.

The committee heard how Mr Sherlock was depressed and stressed at the time, following a marriage breakdown.

Mr Hudson said Mr Sherlock would often carry out the forgeries at night when drunk, and the patients often did not match up with the drugs prescribed and were not registered with the doctors whose signatures he forged.

"He was guilty of very serious breaches of trust over a protracted period. His fraud was carefully planned and executed, and resulted in him being able to extract very large sums of money from the public purse for which he was not entitled," he added.

In a letter to the committee, Mr Sherlock, who was not represented and did not attend, accepted that his behaviour was an abuse of trust and conduct unbecoming of a pharmacist.

He put it down to his problems relating to his marriage break-up and resulting financial situation, and said: "I'm very ashamed of my actions, it was totally out of character for me. It was not a simple case of greed on my part but that of a desperate man trying not to lose everything in his life."

Committee chairman Lord Fraser of Carmyllie QC said: "It is to his credit that he was fully co-operative with police and had repaid all the money that he wrongly claimed."