Careers

Introducing undergraduates to a career in hospital pharmacy

By Alan Hindle, DipClinPharm, MRPharmS, Jeff Aston, MSc, MRPharmS, Michelle Haddock, DipClinPharm, MRPharmS, Matt Wright, DipClinPharm, MRPharmS, and Liz Payne, MSc, MRPharmS

Raising awareness of hospital pharmacy among undergraduates is one of the aims of a team of teacher practitioners based at hospitals in the West Midlands. This article describes their work and the responses of students to it

Careers series

Careers articles wanted Please let us know if you could contribute an article to supplement the careers series. Telephone Hospital Pharmacist on 020 7572 2425/2419

This article as FULL TEXT PDF (80K)

Alan Hindle is lead teacher practitioner at the University of Wolverhampton pharmacy department. At the time of the study he was teacher practitioner based at Dudley Group of Hospitals NHS Trust.

Jeff Aston is lead teacher practitioner at The Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals NHS Trust.

Michelle Haddock, Matt Wright and Liz Payne are teacher practitioners at Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust, University Hospital Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust and Walsall Group of Hospitals NHS Trust, respectively.

Signpost

SUMMARY

Traditionally, pharmacy undergraduates at Aston University, Birmingham have attended local hospitals to gain an appreciation of the various roles of staff within a hospital pharmacy department and to further develop their skills in clinical pharmacy practice. However, these visits usually took place only in the third and fourth years of the undergraduate pharmacy course and the arrangement with local trusts was informal.

We believed that undergraduates were not being exposed to hospital pharmacy early enough in their course and were therefore not considering it as a potential career option. Students were not being given enough opportunities to build on the therapeutic knowledge they learnt at university and to develop professionalism when dealing with patients and other health care professionals.

In 2003 Birmingham and the Black Country Strategic Health Authority (now NHS West Midlands) allocated funding for six half-time equivalent teacher practitioner posts and one full-time lead post at various West Midlands hospitals. The other half of each post was funded by the employing hospital to maintain a practice component to the role. The main role of the team of teacher practitioners is to provide practice-based clinical pharmacy teaching and to promote hospital pharmacy as a career.

Under the new programme, the topics covered and the number of sessions attended depends on the year of study as described below. Students usually attend sessions in groups of five or six. All sessions are compulsory, although only the third and fourth year sessions are formally assessed.