In common with many countries, the National Health Service (NHS) has undertaken major reviews of how it meets society’s health needs. Changing demographics, advances in healthcare and increased patient involvement and expectation mean that the NHS.
Factors that will influence workforce development in the coming years
In common with many
countries, the National Health Service (NHS) has undertaken major reviews of
how it meets society’s health needs. Changing demographics, advances in
healthcare and increased patient involvement and expectation mean that the NHS,
in common with health systems in other countries, is now entering another phase
of major reform.
The financial
pressure on public services caused in large part by international problems in
financial sectors has brought renewed urgency to the need to reform the NHS. It
has been necessary to identify how to manage reduced budgets and still meet a
range of growing and competing demands.
Following on from
the Kennedy report into the problems in Bristol Heart Surgery Services, the
Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence was established to oversee the
roles of the individual professional regulatory bodies.5, 6 For
pharmacy, this led to a change in the role of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society
of Great Britain (RPSGB), with all of its statutory professional regulatory
functions being transferred during 2010 to the General Pharmaceutical Council.7
Amongst these functions are the profes-sional standards and codes of conduct
that govern the education, training and CPD of pharmacists and pharmacy
technicians.
Whilst the NHS has
always undertaken workforce planning in an attempt to match the workforce
demands of the service with the commissioned numbers of professionals in
training, it has recently been severely criticised for not being fit for
purpose.8 This is a difficult task that needs to make informed
assumptions about the factors affecting both the demand and the supply side of
this system. The Centre for Workforce Intelligence has been established to
improve this process.9 One of the key approaches that it is hoped
will improve workforce planning is the transition to a focus on care pathways:
by deter-mining how key groups of patients will be managed, a workforce model
can then be built to estimate more accurately the numbers and types of staff
required. One of the challenges with this approach will be to ensure that this
planning has sufficient granularity to estimate smaller professional groups
such as the pharmacy workforce, and in particular the very specialised roles
that may not be obvious when considering a pathway but that make an important
contribution to healthcare as a whole.
Advanced practice
has been defined as when a new role is so significantly different from the
original registered qualification that members of the pro-fession and public
need to be able to identify the new practitioner and under-stand the education,
training and assessment associated with the new role. This is a complex area
that has to achieve a balance between providing services that are fit for
purpose and affordable, meet collective and individual professional aspirations
and protect the public interest.
Currently, apart
from pharmacists with extended prescribing responsibil-ities, there is no
statutory recognition of advanced and specialist practice; registrants are
either pharmacists (with or without prescribing responsibil-ities) or they are
pharmacy technicians.
Medical Education
England was set up in 2009 to align professional training, education and
workforce needs with the needs of the service and patients following on from
the Lord Darzi NHS Next Stage Review: A High Quality Workforce. Medical Education England will provide independent expert advice on education
and training and workforce planning for doctors, den-tists, healthcare
scientists and pharmacists. The pharmacy agenda is being taken forward by the
Modernising Pharmacy Careers Project Board. At the time of writing, their work
programme covers the following areas that, clearly, will lead to change in the
education and training of the hospital pharmacy workforce:
·
the development and implementation of a new approach to
pharmacist undergraduate education and preregistration training
·
enabling the registered pharmacy workforce to acquire the
additional skills needed to deliver a wider range of clinical services
·
building on current arrangements for advanced pharmacy
practice
·
determining and facilitating changes in the training of key
pharmacy support staff to improve pharmacy skill mix, making the best use of
all those working in pharmacy.
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