Hospital Pharmacist
2007;14:163-165
May 2007

Applying the KSF to general level pharmacists

By Alison Eggleton, MRPharmS, Brit Cadman, MRPharmS, Helen Howe, FRPharmS, and Denise Farmer, MRPharmS

SUMMARY

One of the guiding principles of the NHS Knowledge and Skills Framework (KSF) is that it should be capable of linking with current competence frameworks that apply to certain NHS staff groups. This is because the KSF does not describe the exact knowledge and skills that people need to develop. Other, more specific, competence frameworks can be used as evidence of achievement of the dimensions and levels of the KSF where this is agreed and applicable.

General level framework

The General Level Competency Framework (GLF) is a pharmacist-specific framework that describes the competencies and behaviours that should be applied by pharmacists delivering core or general pharmacy services. In NHS hospitals, this is usually band 6 pharmacists. It has been developed by the Competency Development and Evaluation Group (CoDEG), a collaborative network of developers and researchers, practitioners and specialist and academic pharmacists. Core membership of CoDEG comes from London, Eastern and South East Clinical Pharmacy Specialist Services and the schools of pharmacy at the universities of Brighton and London.

The GLF has been successfully evaluated in hospital, primary care and community pharmacy settings. It separates individual behaviours into competencies clustered into four main areas:

• Delivery of patient care
• Personal development
• Problem solving
• Management and organisational skills (added to version two of the GLF)2

Unlike the KSF, the GLF includes attitudes, as well as knowledge and skills, and allows performance against behaviours to be rated and compared against agreed achievement levels. This performance measurement aids the identification of specific learning needs.

This article describes an initiative at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, where the role and development of band 6 pharmacists were revised to incorporate the requirements of the KSF and linked to the GLF. We wanted to determine whether the GLF could be used as evidence to demonstrate achievement of the KSF profile for a band 6 pharmacist, both at foundation and at full profile levels. The project involved:

• Step 1: Developing a KSF outline for band 6 pharmacists
• Step 2: Linking the KSF outline for band 6 pharmacists with the GLF
• Step 3: Identifying the evidence needed to produce a GLF-based portfolio
• Step 4: Implementation

Full text article (PDF 50K)