The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 270 No 7245 p557-558
19 April 2003

Society summary

Comments sought on Society's draft competency framework for future pharmacy workforce

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society is seeking comments on a draft competency framework for the pharmacy workforce of the next five to 10 years. It hopes for feedback from a wide range of stakeholders to inform the framework's future development and testing, and wants responses by 30 June.

The framework will be part of the first phase of a project to identify the competencies pharmacists will need to perform the range of roles that will make up future pharmacy practice. The framework has been drawn up after an analysis of a broad range of Government policy documents to identify the future competence requirements both for health care professionals in general and for pharmacists in particular. The framework combines the outcome of this analysis with the current frameworks for pharmacy undergraduate education and preregistration training.

A summary report on the work, including the draft framework and the consultation questions, is now available to download from the policy section of the Society's website. Other sections include an analysis of the Government proposals and their implications for pharmacy, a document mapping the framework to source documents on Government policy, another document mapping it to current pharmacy undergraduate and preregistration frameworks, and summaries of current competence or standards frameworks for a range of other health professions.

For those without access to the internet, copies of the report are available from Karen Turnham in the Society's policy development unit (tel 020 7572 2218; e-mail kturnham@rpsgb.org.uk).

The policy unit emphasises that the framework is at an early stage of development. Considerable further development and testing will be required.

The framework currently includes 266 elements of competence, organised under 20 domains — 13 generic domains containing competencies that all health care professions will need and seven pharmacy-specific domains. Each element of competence has been given a short title intended to be widely applicable. For example, the descriptor "Promoting choice" could apply to the clinical director who sets the strategic framework for promoting choice within a service and also to the front-line worker who ensures that individual patients are aware of the choices available.

The next stage of the project, which is already under way, involves preliminary "reality testing" of the initial draft competency framework with groups of pharmacists and individuals who have taken up new or extended pharmacy roles. This is intended to test the fit between the draft competency framework and the skill and competence requirements of these new roles. The results of this "reality testing" will be fed into the ongoing development of the framework.

Further work will be carried out on the pharmacy-specific competencies to distinguish the core competencies that all pharmacists will need to acquire before registration from those competencies required for specialist or higher level roles that pharmacists would acquire later as needed. The core competencies will therefore have particular relevance for the future content of pharmacy undergraduate and preregistration programmes.

The results of the project will be fed into the Society's strategic development of pharmacy education and training at all stages from undergraduate education to continuing professional development. It will also have relevance for other core areas of the Society's work — for example, professional standards, practice development, revalidation, research and the Code of Ethics, plus new initiatives such as workforce planning, skill mix and support worker regulation.

The report notes that a number of other health professions have already produced new competence or standards frameworks, most of which focus on the competencies required at the point of qualification. In the training of doctors, in particular, there is a pressure to shorten programmes of professional preparation at all levels to include only what is strictly necessary for a particular role or career stage. For example, the new framework for undergraduate medical training focuses on the competencies needed by a preregistration house officer. Knowledge and skills required at later career stages will be acquired when needed.

The report says that the concept of providing "just in time" training reflects both the impossibility of learning and retaining all information of possible future relevance and the relatively brief currency of scientific knowledge. Changes in disease patterns, health care interventions and service delivery have also created a need to work differently: the sole practitioner is fast disappearing and health professionals increasingly need to engage in interdisciplinary working across organisational boundaries.

Commenting on links between this project and workforce planning and development, the report suggests that the approach taken to identifying pharmacists' future competence requirements is highly consistent with the Government's approach to health care workforce planning.

The key elements of this, according to a recent definition by the Department of Health, are: defining the vision for future services, identifying future demand, mapping the existing workforce, developing the future workforce and developing a workforce action plan.