The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 275 No 7356 p3
2 July 2005

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News summary

Career pathway set for critical care pharmacists

Guidance on the practice, skills and experience needed by pharmacists who want to specialise in adult critical care in England has been published by the Department of Health (PDF 130K).

The guidance, which sets out a competency framework for progression from preregistration trainee to critical care consultant pharmacist, is intended to contribute to the development of a national template for consultant pharmacist posts in general. It proposes a skills, training and competency framework that is intended to apply to every pharmacist who provides critical care services, whether working at a smaller hospital and providing such services for only an hour a day, or at a larger hospital as part of a dedicated team of critical care pharmacists.

As well as setting out the competencies expected of staff at five separate levels — preregistration trainee, clinical pharmacist/post-registration pharmacist, specialist clinical pharmacist (with foundation level competencies), advanced clinical pharmacist (with excellence level competencies) and consultant pharmacist (with mastery level competencies) — the guidance makes a number of recommendations.

It says that junior pharmacists who regularly provide services to critical care areas must have access to a specialist critical care pharmacist who may work in the same NHS trust or be available externally. Furthermore, it is a specific recommendation of the expert group that pharmacists caring for critically ill patients should have foundation level competencies as a minimum standard.

The group also says that larger critical care units dealing with a wide range of complex patients require the highest level of critical care pharmacy support and that it is for chief pharmacists to ensure that their staff have appropriate competencies.
The guidance was drawn up by an expert group that included 15 specialist critical care pharmacists and five senior NHS pharmacists.

Catherine McKenzie, a specialist critical care pharmacist at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust, London, and a member of the expert group, said: “What we want to encourage is pharmacists sharing best practice in networks. This is not intended to be a workforce planning document. It is intended to support pharmacists who are already working in intensive care. The DoH wants every intensive care patient to get the same level of pharmacy service. The next step might be to produce a training package in intensive care for pharmacists.”

David Webb, director of clinical pharmacy, London, Eastern and South Eastern specialist pharmacy services, said that a recent audit had found that six out of 36 pharmacists working in critical care met the competency criteria for consultant pharmacists. A further three could be described as leading edge practitioners.