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Bronwyn Clark, chief executive
and registrar, and Eleanor Hawthorn,
chairman of the Pharmacy Council of New Zealand
John Shaw, councillor
and head of the School of Pharmacy, University of Auckland
|
We were interested to read the article by John Ferguson (PJ,
24 September, p374–5 PDF (70K)) which confirms for us the somewhat
untenable nature of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s termination
of the reciprocal registration arrangement with Australia and New Zealand.
The Pharmacy Council of New Zealand, which succeeded the Pharmaceutical
Society of New Zealand in September 2004 as
the regulatory body for pharmacy in New Zealand, has refrained from responding
to these changes in your columns up until now, as we still hope that
progress can be achieved in setting a realistic replacement agreement
between the two jurisdictions. We feel it is now timely that we voice
our concerns publicly on the process to date and the frustrations that
we have experienced in this process.
Mr Ferguson gives a detailed history of the previous agreement that has
served both countries well in the past. The Pharmacy Council of New Zealand
does not refute the necessity of revisiting the agreement in this modern
era of ensuring that pharmacists are competent to practise for the safety
of the public and, in light of the recent implementation of the new Health
Practitioners Competence Assurance Act 2003 in New Zealand, would have
been approaching the Society, and other authorities with which agreements
remain, to investigate new mechanisms for this assurance.
The fact that the Society pre-empted such discussions by announcing in
December 2003 by way of The Pharmaceutical Journal that the agreement
was to be ceased made it difficult for the New Zealand profession to
respond.
Despite repeated attempts by the then Pharmaceutical Society of New Zealand
to engage in dialogue with the Society, it was not until November 2004
that the Secretary and Registrar of the Society met with New Zealand
and Australian pharmacy registering authorities. This meeting was in
fact an opportunity for the Society to dictate what the new arrangements
would be, and not an open sharing of ideas as was expected from our end.
The main reason cited for the need for change appears to be about the “naming” of
the initial registerable qualification, which is now an MPharm in the
UK and a BPharm in New Zealand. Graham
Phillips (PJ, 10 September, p308)
states that there is a clear difference in these qualifications. We strongly
dispute this assertion. The BPharm in New Zealand has always been a four-year
qualification. In the UK, the previous three-year BPharm was renamed
as an MPharm when the programme was extended to four years in the late
1990s; this was in response to one university whose senate stipulated
that a four-degree should be awarded at master’s level.
In New Zealand the Committee on University Academic Programmes defines
a master’s degree as “demonstrably in advance of undergraduate
study”, and “normally completed after five years of full-time
tertiary study”. Ironically, the New Zealand BPharm degrees have
been closely mapped to the Society’s “indicative syllabus”,
and apart from some relatively small differences in pharmacy law and
administration, the curricula are similar to the UK MPharm degrees in
content, scope and academic rigour.
We therefore believe that the New Zealand qualifications meet the EU
directive requirement of “a course of at least five years including
at least four years at university (or equivalent) and at least six months’ traineeship
in
a community or hospital pharmacy”, since our graduates complete
a competence-based preregistration programme while working as intern
pharmacists for a year. The New Zealand preregistration programme has
also been recognised internationally as a model programme, with competence
assessment including a final objective structured clinical examination
assessment since 1997, and has been used as a basis for new programmes
in South Africa, South Australia and Queensland.
Therefore, we believe that it is quite frankly insulting to expect New
Zealand pharmacists, whose qualifications and competence have always
been accepted as at an equal standard to UK pharmacists, to spend a year “studying” pharmacy
(at considerable expense) in order to meet equivalency to the MPharm
and then another preregistration year.
Our understanding is that the same overseas pharmacists assessment programme
course will be provided to pharmacists
from countries throughout the world that have completely different educational
and pharmacy practice standards to that in New Zealand.
Pharmacists from the UK and New Zealand currently tell us that practice
is still similar in the two countries, and there is plenty of previous
correspondence in your columns attesting to this. We have no intention
of imposing such requirements on United Kingdom pharmacists coming to
New Zealand to practise, since we have no evidence on which to base such
a two-year process.
In June this year the Pharmacy Council
of New Zealand asked the Society to
consider alternative mechanisms for the recognition of New Zealand pharmacists
to enter the United Kingdom, and gave some examples of how this could
be achieved.
We were heartened to receive confirmation from the Society that it would
not “in principle” reject the idea of an alternative route
to assess the competence of New Zealand pharmacists, and were also pleased
to read in the letter by Mr Phillips that the Society is actively exploring
such alternative mechanisms. We have recently been informed that Society
staff are returning “down under” to meet with us on such
new pathways, and we hope that this will be a more consultative process
than has previously happened.
We hope these future discussions will
lead to mechanisms that will allow our pharmacists to continue to practise
in the UK, to contribute successfully to pharmacy practice there, to
learn from the wide range of practice available, and then return to New
Zealand to continue to contribute to our profession. |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal