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Consultations

Pharmacy workforce in the New NHS: Making the best use of staff to deliver the NHS Pharmacy Programme

Launch date:

26 September 2002
Closing date:

31 December 2002
Creator/s:

Department of Health
Audience:

Health and social care professionals
Copyright holder:

Crown

'Delivering the NHS Plan,' published in April, said that 'our objective is to liberate the talent and skills of all the workforce so that every patient gets the right care in the right place at the right time.' Within the NHS Plan, the Government's programme for pharmacy represents an unprecedented agenda for change and modernisation to achieve better use of medicines and improved care for patients. Extending the roles of pharmacists and their staff is key to these aims.

New approaches to workforce development in the NHS also make it imperative that we review and modernise the role of pharmacy support staff. We need to consider roles and responsibilities, training standards, regulation, the nature and extent of supervision, and development and progression of staff, including flexibility to pursue alternative career pathways within the NHS. In particular, we wish to encourage:

Continued extension of the role of pharmacists in supporting patients with their medicines, for example, through medicines management schemes, supplementary prescribing, medication review, local pharmaceutical services and other initiatives;
Parallel development of the role of pharmacy technicians and other support staff to provide improved patient services;
Development of appropriate training standards and a system of regulation for pharmacy support staff to underpin this; and
Development of pilot 'protocol medicines supply schemes' in which suitably qualified and accredited pharmacy technicians, working within standard protocols, can dispense and supply medicines without the personal supervision of a pharmacist.

This strategy will help us create a modern workforce with the capacity necessary to achieve the aims of Pharmacy in the Future and maximise the contribution that pharmacists and their staff can make to delivering the NHS Plan.

This paper sets out the Department of Health's views on the changes that are needed to make the best use of the pharmacy workforce to deliver the aims of 'Pharmacy in the Future.' It provides an opportunity for comment on the way forward, but does not represent settled policy and may, therefore, be subject to change. We are likely to be consulting separately on particular aspects in due course.