The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 277 No 7419 p356
23 September 2006

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Training in the spotlight more
No room at the top more

Training in the spotlight

Aspects of undergraduate pharmacy education and preregistration training are due for a realignment. The findings of research carried out by academics at Aston University and published as an Original paper this week (p369) could serve as a starting point. It is unlikely that many of the observations will come as much of a surprise to people involved in teaching and training would-be pharmacists or setting course standards.

It may come as a surprise to the general pharmacy population, however, that graduates from different schools have different parts of the syllabus examined and assessed in different ways. For example, there is wide variation in how much the final-year project contributes to the overall degree classification — although there is no suggestion that graduates of one system are better prepared than those from another.

What is more of a mismatch is the relationship between the undergraduate curriculum and the preregistration year. The problems are exacerbated because, unlike with other health professions, whose training is fully integrated into the NHS, undergraduate pharmacy courses are considered to offer science-based degrees and so are financed by the higher education funding councils. As a result there is no formal requirement for provision of suitable practice-based learning at the undergraduate level. A lot hangs, therefore, on what pharmacy graduates learn in the preregistration year, which needs to cover many bases before a trainee can register.

With greater emphasis on the clinical component of many pharmacy jobs, much more needs to be done to ensure that the undergraduate curriculum and the preregistration year are structured systematically and with each other in mind. Organisers of preregistration placements and training in England and Wales might have something to learn from Scotland where, this week (p359), a new scheme has been launched to ensure that all preregistration trainees funded by NHS Education for Scotland receive the same opportunities and standard of training.

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No room at the top

Lists of the best, richest, favourite etc are designed to be controversial and will always exclude somebody's top choice. This week the Health Service Journal publishes its list of the 50 people with most influence on the NHS. There are few shocks in terms of politicians, Department of Health mandarins and NHS senior managers. And we would expect to see the chief medical officer and presidents of leading royal medical colleges listed, along with the chairman of the British Medical Association. The chief nursing officer comes in at 40. But there are no pharmacists or, for that matter, representatives of any other health profession. Will pharmacy have come of age when it breaks through that sort of glass ceiling?

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