ROBERT DEWDNEY, head of education division, Royal Pharmaceutical Society, responds:

If the Council decides to add the marginal cost of evaluation and feedback to the fixed costs of the CPD system, then fees would rise of the order of £5 per annum. Of course there is the option of absorbing this cost and cutting other activities. Evaluation and feedback have been piloted in three exercises over the past three years. Records of over 500 pharmacists have been addressed, using pharmacist and non-pharmacist evaluators. This work, undertaken jointly with the department of applied statistics of the University of Reading, will be published in due course.

A central feature of the work has been evaluating the evaluators as much, indeed at this stage more than, evaluating pharmacists’ CPD records. We envisage and are building into the system ongoing quality assurance of evaluators. A proportion of CPD records will, unbeknown to them, go to all evaluators and will be the basis for “remedial” work with those outside a reasonable consensus group and, if that is not successful, being dropped. Present evaluation criteria are Appendix 6 to the CPD “Plan and record”, which 17,000 pharmacists have received already. “Plan and record” can be found here