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Workforce development subgroup members
Ray Fitzpatrick, clinical director of pharmacy at Royal Wolverhampton
Hospitals and professor of pharmacy at Wolverhampton University
Carole Blackshaw, head of pharmacy and specialist workforce development
specialist, West Midlands Startegic Health Authority
Brian Hebron, clinical director of pharmacy at City & Sandwell
Hospitals
Jeff Aston, acting lead teacher practitioner at Royal Wolverhampton
Hospitals
Jane Hare, clinical director of pharmacy at Walsall Hospitals
David Millett, pharmacy education and training facilitator at West
Midlands Strategic Health Authority
Andrew Davies, clinical director of pharmacy at Dudley Group of
Hospitals
Geoff Phipps, principal pharmacist for operational services at
Dudley Group of Hospitals
Correspondence to:
Professor Fitzpatrick at Pharmacy
Department, Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals, Wednesfield Road, Wolverhampton
WV10 0QP
e-mail ray.fitzpatrick@rwh-tr.nhs.uk |
SUMMARY
The provision of health care in the UK has changed significantly
over the past decade, with improved access to treatment, reduced waiting
times
and reduced length of stay in hospital. An important factor in these
changes has been the increasing use of medicines. Central to the medicines
management agenda is the pharmacist, whose role in the delivery of health
care has also changed, with an increased emphasis
on the clinical aspects of practice. These developing clinical and professional
roles have dictated changes in pharmacy undergraduate education.
In recent years there has been a move to increase the clinical component
of pharmacy education to match the modern role of pharmacists within
health care, and further change will be driven by the Royal Pharmaceutical
Society of Great Britain review of core competencies. Furthermore, a
previously published paper on the perceptions of preregistration trainees
has shown that graduates believe they need more clinical pharmacy training.
The move from a three-year bachelor’s degree in pharmacy to a four-year
master’s degree in 1997 provided schools of pharmacy with the opportunity
to increase significantly the clinical teaching component of the undergraduate
curriculum to meet the needs of modern pharmacy practice. However, in
many schools of pharmacy the additional year has been used to teach more
of other elements of the undergraduate curriculum. This might have arisen
because delivering a more rigorous clinical training requires appropriate
infrastructure including the involvement of clinically based pharmacist
practitioners in the teaching of the undergraduate pharmacy students
and the opportunity for undergraduate students to access the clinical
environment.
The latter has traditionally been achieved through students undertaking
vacation employment and the former has been delivered through the appointment
of teacher-practitioners (TPs). However, most established schools of
pharmacy have only a small number of TPs relative to the total academic
establishment,
which limits the delivery of the above criteria.
Furthermore, many TPs in schools of pharmacy are community-based and,
although these people can provide some clinical pharmacy training, hospital-based
TPs are better placed to expose the student to the full spectrum of clinical
conditions.
Evidence in the literature indicates that there was still a significant
gap in the transition from graduate pharmacy student to practising pharmacist.
The workforce development subgroup of the West Midlands Chief Pharmacists
Network recognised that, by building a TP infrastructure, it should be
possible not only to improve undergraduate clinical teaching, but also
to facilitate the transition of undergraduate pharmacy student to pharmacist
practitioner.
Therefore, a bid was submitted to The Birmingham and the Black Country
Workforce Development Directorate (WDD) for seven hospital pharmacy TP
posts based in NHS trusts across the Birmingham and the Black Country
Strategic Health Authority to work with the local school of pharmacy
at Aston University.
The bid was successful, and subsequently one full-time lead TP post and
six 50/50 TP posts were filled in 2003–04. The full-time post was
fully funded by the WDD.
Half the TP posts was funded by the WDD (for the educational element
of the posts)
and half by the employing trusts (for the practice element of the posts).
The responsibilities of the WDD, trusts and university are set out in
a service level agreement between the WDD as the commissioner and the
relevant hospital pharmacy as the employer for each post.
Full text article PDF (60K) |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal