The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 274 No 7337 p209
19 February 2005

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Hot competition for places at Kingston

In September last year, the department of pharmacy at Kingston University accepted its first intake of students. Dawn Connelly visited the university to find out how it is preparing its MPharm students for future pharmacy practice

Demand for a place on the MPharm course at the new department of pharmacy at Kingston University is high. The department is currently interviewing prospective students for its September 2005 intake and has received over 1,000 applications for the 90 places on offer. The course was accredited by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society last April and the department accepted its first cohort of students last September.

According to John Brown, head of the department at Kingston, a pharmacy degree course has been on the cards there for the past 15 years. The idea was conceived by the former dean of the school of chemical and pharmaceutical sciences in the late 1980s. Later, the pharmaceutical science programme, which started in 1995 and was developed to provide graduates with skills particularly suited to pharmaceutical applications, was seen as a bridge between chemistry and pharmacy. “The idea was to have pharmaceutical sciences as a stepping stone to help to produce the infrastructure for an MPharm course,” explains Professor Brown.

The department’s philosophy

The pharmacy department currently has 10 members of academic staff, six of whom are pharmacists. Staff are allowed to spend 20 per cent of their time on professional development, such as pursuing research activities or working in community or hospital pharmacy practice. By next year, the department plans to have recruited seven teacher-practitioners, three from the community and four from the hospital sector.

Professor Brown joined Kingston in 2002 as professor of pharmacy following a year as deputy head of pharmacy at the University of Bradford. His vision for the department is clear: “Clinical pharmacy is at the heart of what we want to be teaching, particularly in the latter stages of the course,” he says. “Because we didn’t have the baggage of an older school, we could look at what we felt were the needs of the profession for students graduating in 2008 and onwards, and ensure that we designed a course that enabled students to make a significant contribution to the profession.”

Science is also central to the course, says Professor Brown. Chemistry, pharmaceutical science and pharmaceutical technology and formulation are already strong teaching and research areas at Kingston. It was important to bring these elements into the planning of the MPharm course, he explains.

Teaching by academic clinicians

An innovative aspect of the course is that it has been designed to include academic clinicians as part of the teaching process. The course was developed in association with St George’s Hospital Medical School, London, and is the fourth joint health care course between the two institutions, the others being physiotherapy, radiography and nursing and midwifery. For one semester each year, students attend lectures, practical classes and problem-based learning workshops at St George’s one day a week. These sessions are taught by clinicians, who also teach medical students and other health care professionals. In the fourth year, the advanced clinical pharmacy course will be largely taught at St George’s and students will take part in problem-based learning tutorials along with other health care professionals. Chris Cairns, professor of pharmacy practice, comments: “Unlike a lot of the other interprofessional education initiatives, this is core as opposed to a ‘bolt on’.”

In addition, clinical modules will be taught in situ by teacher practitioners at St George’s Hospital and Kingston Hospital. “We would also like to find some community settings for clinical pharmacy teaching,” says Professor Cairns, who explains that he will work together with the community teacher practitioners in order to deliver this teaching.

Practice placements

Students at Kingston attend practice placements in the two main sectors of the profession from the first semester. During years one and two, each student spends one day per semester shadowing a community or hospital pharmacist. Students work from a structured logbook and produce a diary of their activities. In the third year, the placements are linked to clinical modules and consist of two weeks in hospital, community or primary care. In the fourth year, students are likely to spend time shadowing hospital doctors, GPs and nurses; an industry placement is also being negotiated.

Prescribing

Students will be taught the principles of pharmacy prescribing during the third year of the course. “We are gearing up our students so that when they leave they will become competent independent prescribers,” says Parastou Donyai, senior lecturer in pharmacy practice. The department is also negotiating with the school of nursing at Kingston about the possibility of running a joint postgraduate course in supplementary prescribing.

Several other postgraduate courses are planned for 2006: an MSc or diploma in clinical pharmacy; an MSc or diploma in cancer therapeutics; and, possibly, a postgraduate course in paediatric pharmacy. Negotiations are also under way for a postgraduate course for community pharmacists.

Professional development

Continuing professional development becomes mandatory for pharmacists this year. With this in mind, the pharmacy department has introduced a personal development portfolio that aims to encourage the reflective learning that is integral to the CPD cycle. The portfolio is monitored via the personal tutoring system and Dr Donyai has received funding to evaluate the personal development portfolio system formally, and to recommend ways of promoting and maintaining its use by pharmacy students.

Progress so far

The first examinations of the course “went well”. Professor Brown says that some good results were achieved, the failure rate was relatively low and student satisfaction with the course appears to be high.

Salma Patel, a pharmacy undergraduate, says that her favourite parts of the course so far are the professional practice module and the dispensing classes. “I found that I could relate this directly to the pharmacist’s job and got hands-on practice at what I would be doing in the future.” And this enthusiasm was reflected in her examination results when she achieved the equivalent of a first in the professional practice module.