The future

The future

The NHS will continue to modernise and change. This will bring new demands on the profession that will need to be underpinned with well-educated, trained and competent staff. Among these factors will be:

· revised General Pharmaceutical Council standards for education, training and CPD for pharmacists and pharmacy technicians

· training, often delivered by employers on a mandatory basis, to support medicines governance, for example, to ensure competence for prescribing, prescription screening and dispensing chemotherapy

· greater uptake of new ways to support learning and assessment, for example, greater use of e-portfolios, e-learning and e-assessment

· the further definition of advanced and specialist practice and the specification of the learning needs of those practitioners

· the incorporation of new elements of practice into undergraduate and preregistration training, for example, elements of prescribing competencies and supply through patient group directions

· CPD and revalidation to practice

· new systems for workforce planning.