Consultation on the Quality Assurance of Pharmacy Education and Training
Published: 21/05/24
The General Pharmaceutical Council is seeking views on changing its approach to the quality assurance of pharmacy education and training.
Pharmacy’s professional regulator, the GPhC, is seeking views on the quality assurance process of all pharmacy education and training. The GPhC has proposed four key changes to the current quality assurance process with the aim to identify educational issues more effectively, act more quickly to address these issues, and to provide more equality in the monitoring and scrutiny process for all providers.
This gives patients and the public the confidence that pharmacists and pharmacy technicians joining the register are skilled and knowledgeable, and that they demonstrate appropriate professional behaviours as a result of their education and training. It also ensures pharmacy education and training takes place safely for all involved and is conducted in a way that is fair and provides a positive experience for students and trainees.
Our response can be found below.
The four key changes to the quality assurance of pharmacy education being proposed are:
Introduce yearly monitoring with greater use of data we collect before the approval event which will enable us to identify and address concerns together with the providers in a more timely, proportionate, and systematic manner.
Define clear lines of responsibility and criteria for making decisions about whether or not to re-approve a course or qualification, including decision-making routes based on the level of assurance we get from providers and whether there is an identified need to intervene.
Adopt a more flexible approval and intervention process so that, as well as continuing to monitor on a regular basis, we will also have the flexibility to intervene more quickly where concerns are identified.
Achieve greater scrutiny by applying our quality assurance processes across all pharmacy education and training which will mean that the same arrangements will apply to all providers.
Section 1: Yearly monitoring
Part of our proposal is to make better use of our data and introduce a yearly monitoring process to improve the quality assurance of education and training. The data we will consider as part of yearly monitoring will include a number of areas on which we will ask the provider to comment.
For example, we will ask about:
the management, oversight and delivery of education and training,
and
the delivery of experiential and interprofessional learning during the academic year
We will also consider data from other sources, such as National Student Surveys (NSS) and student and trainee feedback collected by the GPhC. The yearly monitoring process will build upon our present yearly data collection processes and timings, so that there is a single reporting point each year. This will allow for a more tailored approach to the timing of the approval activities. We will be able to adapt the present three-yearly event cycle, so that timings between events can be changed based on the outcome of yearly monitoring. It will help us, and the providers, maintain oversight of the quality of the education and training provision. It will also help us to spot and deal with concerns early. The overall aim is to assure patients and the public that GPhC standards and requirements for education and training continue to be met.
Section 2: Intervention, escalation and decision-making.
As part of reviewing the information we gather during our yearly monitoring, we will need good decision-making and appropriate ways of dealing with concerns. Therefore, we propose a set of four intervention activities to be carried out by appropriate teams (the GPhC Quality Assurance team, the Approval team or both). These will help us make sure that any concerns are dealt with in the most effective ways and that their impact on the delivery of education and training is as low as possible.
Section 3: Increased flexibility for approval and intervention.
The proposed update to the quality assurance of education and training will give us more flexibility in the way we approve course provision. We will be able to intervene when we spot concerns, and work with providers to help deal with these quickly. Equally, because of the flexibility we will have with the proposed yearly monitoring and intervention processes, we will no longer publish an ‘end date‘ for our approval. Instead, we will publish a proposed date for the next planned interim or reapproval event .
Section 4: Applying our processes across all pharmacy education and training
Pharmacy technician and pharmacy support staff qualifications are delivered and overseen by national awarding organisations. At the moment we reapprove them using a six-year cycle, with an interim event every three years.
This is also the case for Master of Pharmacy (MPharm) degrees delivered by higher education institutions. However, pharmacy technician and pharmacy support staff courses that are delivered by private providers do not have this quality oversight from other organisations. So we reapprove these using a three-year cycle. This reapproval arrangement also applies to the pharmacist independent prescribing programmes delivered by higher education institutions. By introducing yearly monitoring, we will have greater oversight of all courses of pharmacy education and training. Therefore, we propose to apply to private providers and pharmacist independent prescribing providers the same arrangements that apply to national awarding organisations and MPharm providers. In effect, this will result not only in greater scrutiny but in a consistent quality assurance approach overall.