The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 269 No 7209 p147
3 August 2002

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Ethics training wins funding bid

The consortium set up for advancing the provision of pharmacy law and ethics teaching (APPLET), involving schools of pharmacy from Nottingham, Aston and De Montfort universities, has won funding of £250,000 for its three-year project from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).

APPLET said in its bid that the current undergraduate pharmacy law and ethics curriculum is poorly specified, with teaching largely by part-time, practice-based, non-specialist pharmacists. However, changes in pharmacists' roles such as the shift to clinical practice require a curriculum that delivers an explicit understanding and assessment at undergraduate level of health care law and bioethics.

Professor Joy Wingfield, professor of pharmacy law and ethics at Nottingham University, and the project director, said: "This funding will take the teaching of law and ethics beyond the Medicines Act and show that there is more to it than simply controlling the supply of drugs."

The money will be put to many uses, including setting up a project team, launching a website, looking at curriculum information in disciplines related to pharmacy, running a number of pilots and making evaluations, with more than half of the fund to be spent on dissemination activities, such as providing workshops for teachers of pharmacy law and ethics.

The project, due to start on 1 October, has the support of the Society (PJ, 9 February, p164) and the Department of Health, both of which are nominating representatives to the project's steering group.

Professor Wingfield said that although the HEFCE money is limited to higher education institutions, the project proposal includes a strategy for the development of training support for existing pharmacists.