| · Registration examination
· Emergency supplies (2)
· Hospital pharmacy
· National boards (2)
· Reciprocity
· CPD
· Grandparent clauses
Letters to the Editor
|
Registration examination
Almost pointless
From Mr I. R. Davis, MRPharmS
I would like to offer my heartfelt congratulations to Sultan
Dajani following his comments in the PJ last week (16 July, p82), in which he
questions the ability of the registration examination to cultivate more
competent pharmacists, compared with those who qualified before the examination
was introduced. I fully agree with his view that the registration exam
is almost pointless, and that the preregistration year can easily allow
development of competence to practise.
I find his comments particularly timely on this day, as I have a friend
who has just discovered she failed the registration examination, solely
due to scoring 65 per cent in the calculations, just missing the 70 per
cent pass mark by one correct answer. Mr Dajani quite correctly states
that the examination tests “time-keeping skills and not competency”.
I could see her holding tears back as she told me how she felt so rushed
to finish that she did not answer three of the calculation questions,
nor did she guess at answers for the sake of it. I have absolutely no
doubt she will make an excellent pharmacist, and so how ironic it is
that she is deemed not competent to join the Register of Pharmaceutical
Chemists at this time, yet had she guessed three answers, she quite possibly
could have been deemed “competent” by the Society.
My friend is totally competent to practise, yet she is denied this chance,
this right of hers, through nothing more than being beaten by an unfairly imposed
time constraint, something which rarely, if ever, has such importance in practice.
As Mr Dajani points out, competence (as is demonstrated in the “real
world”, rather than in a hall of 200 terrified graduates) can be demonstrated
by, for example, making a mistake, identifying it and then rectifying it, learning
from it and doing better next time. This sounds strangely like the ethos of
a continuing professional development cycle, a process so warmly embraced by
the Society.
Ian Davis
Eastbourne,
East Sussex
|
The
Pharmaceutical Journal