Introduction Hospital pharmacy is undergoing rapid change in response to National Health Service developments and recruitment and retention issues. This is forcing trusts to review the roles of pharmacy staff.¹ The knowledge and skills of pharmacy technicians must be developed and used to enable hospital pharmacy to have a future.² A self-development programme for hospital pharmacy technicians was implemented in North Thames in summer, 1998. The objectives of the evaluation were to identify the extent of implementation of the programme and to assess the acceptance of the programme.

Method In November, 1999, structured questionnaires were sent to all qualified pharmacy technicians in trusts in North Thames (n=683). The survey was designed using Formic software,³ enabling automatic data capture and analysis. The transtheoretical model of change⁴ (describing stages of change implementation) was applied as part of the evaluation.

Results Three-hundred and six technicians (45 per cent) returned their questionnaires.
Extent of implementation of the programme - Technicians were asked "have you started to work through the technician self-development programme?". Two-hundred-and-thirty-two (76 per cent) technicians responded to this question, and were grouped corresponding to the stages of change (Table 1). There were no significant differences between the groups for age, sex, or grade. Two-hundred-and-twenty-nine technicians responded when asked about the publicity of the programme. Of the 229 respondents, 149 (65 per cent) thought publicity was not enough, 78 (34 per cent) thought it was about right, and 2 (1 per cent) thought it was too much.

Focal points

• Forty-two (18 per cent) responding technicians had started the programme, 64 (28 per cent) were thinking about it, 45 (19 per cent) were not interested, and 81 (35 per cent) expressed constraints preventing them from pursuing it
• The majority of responding technicians (65 per cent) felt that the publicity of the programme was not enough
• We are considering methods of promoting the programme, especially directly to technicians
• One-hundred-and-nine responding technicians (49 per cent) rated the programme as good or excellent, 101 (46 per cent) rated it as OK, and 12 (5 per cent) as not very good
• Technicians who had started the programme, or were thinking about it, rated the programme more highly than those who had not
• We are considering ways of tailoring technician support according to their stage of implementation of the programme