The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 271 No 7258 p98
19 July 2003

Society summary

End of 30-hour CE requirement: not just yet

The requirement that pharmacists should undertake at least 30 hours of continuing education (CE) each year may be superfluous for those who are now fully engaged in the Royal Pharmaceutical Society's continuing professional development (CPD) programme, but still applies to others, the Society's education division has emphasised.

In a recent news item about the new 27th edition of 'Medicines, ethics and practice: a guide for pharmacists' (MEP), The Journal reported that Section 3.3 has replaced its former information on CE with guidance on CPD (PJ, 5 July, p30). In the process the 30-hour annual target for pharmacists' continuing education has disappeared from the guidance.

An accompanying comment from the Society's education division said that the change reflected the Society's move from CE to CPD but added that, since the CPD roll-out would not reach all pharmacists before the end of 2004, the CE requirement would remain in the Code of Ethics for a transitional period.

In a statement clarifying the change, the education division points out that one of the key responsibilities of pharmacists set out in the Society's Code of Ethics and Standards is "to ensure that their knowledge, skills and performance are of a high quality, up to date, evidence based and relevant to their field of practice" (MEP, p85). The section on professional competence in the code's Standards of Professional Performance includes the related expectation that pharmacists will "develop their professional performance to provide a high level of care to patients" (MEP, p87).

The education division says that 11,000 pharmacists — those who have already been reached by the roll-out of the Society's new CPD system — have a ready means to plan and record their CPD and thereby to provide evidence that they meet the principal requirements of the code. For them, if they follow the new system as intended (and straightforwardly described), the requirement to undertake 30 hours of CE becomes superfluous.

However, for those pharmacists who have not yet been reached by the CPD roll-out, the 30-hour CE standard still applies until they are included in the CPD programme. At some point, possibly at the Society's annual general meeting next year, the code will have to be amended to take account of the fact that the roll-out of the new system is nearing completion. "That is when the 30 hours requirement may be reported as truly ended, " says the education division. It adds that the new MEP guidance (p107) makes no mention of hours of CE because it is solely related to the new CPD system.

Commenting on the change, the head of the Society's education division, Dr Robert Dewdney, said that the 30 hours requirement was really only a marker or even just a proxy for adequate CPD. He added that a new target may emerge — an average of one recorded item of CPD per month. This has already been tested in the CPD Plan & Record sent to pharmacists as part of roll-out and within a Journal article of 5 October last year — both of which are among a broad range of CPD-related documents accessible from the CPD page within the education section of the Society's website.

Dr Dewdney emphasised that further investigation and some extent of consultation would take place before such a target was set and enshrined in the MEP as a requirement.