Training for tomorrow
Pharmacy training needs to be re-examined. With a substantial expansion in new roles in recent years, the profession needs to consider whether its current training is producing people, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level,with the appropriate skills to meet the requirements that these new pharmacy roles bring.
According to a report published this week by the Royal Pharmaceutical
Society, it seems that current training — or at least the training
that existing pharmacists undertook — does not come up to scratch.
The report found gaps between the knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviour
that pharmacists have now and those that they are likely to need in five
or 10 years and pharmacists in all sectors are under-skilled in some
respects (p779). The big question is how to use these findings to inform
future training programmes that provide pharmacists with the skills they
need.
There may be lessons to be learnt from the way medical students are now
trained in some parts of the country. The traditional model, where students
study all the science first before they meet a patient, is gradually
being superseded by an integrated model. Students, from the beginning
of their course meet patients and learn, for example, everything to do
with the heart at the same time — from anatomy to diagnostics and
therapeutics, picking up other skills and experience on the way. Critics
might argue that the integrated style of teaching and learning leaves
students with less in-depth knowledge of many topics; nevertheless the
method does equip them to know what gaps there are in their skills and
competencies and how to fill them.
Certainly schools of pharmacy face a similar issue to medical schools:
how to embed the development of practical skills into academic training.
The obvious way is for students to have regular patient contact throughout
the degree course and not to wait until the preregistration year to learn
consultation skills and team working. Combining some modules of the undergraduate
course between pharmacy, medicine and nursing may be one option to ensure
that team working is developed right from the beginning. Another issue
is the fact that medicines change so quickly. It is difficult to teach
a clinical course that does not become out of date in a few years as
new drugs, and even new classes of drugs, come to market. Perhaps the
answer lies in giving students a basic clinical grounding plus helping
them to develop the skills for, and awareness of the need for, life-long
learning.
But the report’s implications are not just about undergraduate
training. A perhaps bigger question is how existing pharmacists can update
their skills so that they can be competent in the new roles that are
up for grabs. This is a difficult problem to solve, and one that a steering
group set up to take the Society’s findings forward will have to
address.
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