The Boots experience

Boots The Chemists started recruiting pharmacists from abroad about 18 months ago. The company has been on several recruitment visits to both Spain and South Africa. It is planning to return to both countries later this year.

The “unique circumstances of the fallow year” were the reason behind this recruitment drive, explained Joanne Chiltern, pharmacist resource manager, Boots. All the pharmacists are employed on permanent contracts. “We hope that they want to stay and develop their careers with us,” she said.

Were pharmacists from abroad an answer to the shortage? Ms Chiltern thought not: “They are a helpful, important additional resource to work with our existing pharmacists but not the answer,” she said.

The South African and Spanish pharmacists were different from each other, with different career aspirations, she said. Although the Spanish pharmacy degree course is recognised in Britain, language represented the biggest challenge for Spanish pharmacists. Before they are recruited, Boots establishes that pharmacists’ English is of a pre-determined standard using the General Medical Council language test. Meanwhile, the challenge for South African pharmacists is that their degree is not recognised in Britain so they have to undertake a course at Sunderland.

The Spanish pharmacists undergo a three-month induction period in which they work in an allocated branch with a supervising pharmacist who has to assess their competence. Boots’s teacher practitioners are also involved in this training period. The three months can be extended if the pharmacist is deemed not competent to work unsupervised at the end of that time. Part of the training involves induction about Boots so that the pharmacist can integrate into the company.

The pharmacists recruited so far are at different stages of their training and induction period. Altogether, Boots has employed between 30 and 40 Spanish pharmacists and between 80 and 100 South African pharmacists, Ms Chiltern said.

In terms of giving advice to other people looking to recruit pharmacists from abroad, Ms Chiltern said that it was important to make sure that sufficient support was given to the pharmacists in terms of domestic arrangements when they arrived in the UK. This included making sure they could find accommodation and knew how to register with services such as a general practitioner. Some pharmacists from abroad found it useful to share accommodation to support each other, she suggested. In addition, when recruiting from non-English speaking countries, ensuring that pharmacists’ language capabilities were screened was important. Another important consideration is that drug names differ between countries so the pharmacists’ medical English and knowledge of English drug names should be assessed.

Personal experience

Australian pharmacist, Josephine Martelli, is currently working at St Mary’s hospital in London. She came to Britain two years ago and initially worked in hospitals through a locum agency. Following this, she responded to an advertisement for a permanent position at St Mary’s.

The attraction of Britain for Australian pharmacists was to use it as a base to travel, she said. Australian pharmacists tended to come for two-year periods, the length of time that a holiday working visa could be obtained. This did cause problems for pharmacists looking for permanent positions because some hospitals were reluctant to employ pharmacists who could only guarantee staying for two years.

Ms Martelli had not found the transition from working in Australia to working in Britain hard. The training requirement for Australian pharmacists is four weeks’ preregistration experience, she explained.

Locum agencies

Although Ms Martelli signed up with a locum agency once in Britain, some locum agencies do advertise abroad. The May edition of the Australian Journal of Pharmacy carries two advertisements for pharmacist jobs in Britain. One is for JW Medical Recruitment, a UK-based agency that recruits locums for both hospital (NHS and private) and community pharmacy and additionally helps to facilitate permanent positions. The company assesses pharmacist candidates by their curricula vitae and, if successful, puts the pharmacist in contact with the potential employer by e-mail and telephone in order for the employer to assess whether the candidate is suitable.

John Shipman, director of JW Medical Recruitment, said that the company advertises specifically in journals in Australia and New Zealand, primarily because they are English-speaking countries and registering them to work as pharmacists in Britain is easy. “Clients want pharmacists to start working quickly,” he said, and this had to be considered when recruiting overseas pharmacists who had to undergo long training periods before registering. An additional problem he suggested was that companies who recruited overseas pharmacists and invested in training them for as long as a year might find that the pharmacist, once registered, jumped ship.

The shortage of pharmacists in Britain is being highlighted in countries such as Australia, Mr Shipman said. Australian recruitment agencies are promoting the idea that the potential exists to earn high salaries because of the shortage and this is resulting in an increase in the number of pharmacists wanting to come to this country. His own company had noticed a 40 per cent increase in website traffic to its site month on month since last year.

The biggest issue for overseas pharmacists was to work out the type of location they were going to, he said. A large number of overseas pharmacists wanted to work in London. “We need flexibility from pharmacists because they can’t all go to London,” he said.

Another locum agency, TotalLocum, recruits both expatriate pharmacists who are working abroad and local pharmacists. It advertises through the expatriate press.

Recently, the majority of pharmacists it has recruited have come from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Spain, Australia and New Zealand, according to David Fairchild, managing director, TotalLocum. The reason for an interest from Spanish pharmacists is that there is an excess of pharmacists in Spain at the moment, and they are poorly paid, he said. Pharmacists from EC countries, Australia and New Zealand find it easiest to move to work in Britain because the registration process allows them to practise more or less straightaway, he added.

TotalLocum receives about 10 applications a month from pharmacists working abroad who want to practise in Britain. The company places pharmacists recruited abroad in both community and hospital pharmacies.

Many companies use specialist agencies to recruit staff from abroad, Boots says that it has found their expertise useful.

New code of practice

So long as a pharmacist is registered in Britain, there are currently no additional regulations for employment in the NHS hospital sector. However, there are concerns that recruiting NHS staff from some countries, particularly developing countries, could have detrimental effects on the economies of the particular country. This is recognised in the NHS plan: “The NHS will not actively recruit from developing countries in order not to undermine their efforts to provide local health care.” The Government is planning to introduce a new code of practice to help prevent this from happening.

Shortly before the general election, the issue of recruitment of health care staff from abroad was raised in the House of Commons by Paul Burstow, the member of Parliament for Sutton and Cheam. He raised concerns over the fact that recruiting staff, and particularly nurses, from developing countries was damaging those countries’ health care systems. The Health Minister, John Denham, replied: “The Department [of Health] has been working with NHS employers and reputable commercial recruitment organisations to produce a code of practice that reinforces the requirement that international recruitment must never be carried out against the interests of host countries.”

The code will result in NHS employers not actively recruiting from developing countries. The Government expects all recruitment agencies to adhere to the code of practice. Mr Denham added that he believed that the development of the code of practice would put a considerable pressure on the independent sector to abide by similar standards.

On July 5, a spokesman for the Department of Health said that the code of practice would be published later this summer.

Whether or not this will impact on agencies recruiting pharmacists to Britain remains to be seen.