Education Governance Oversight Board to lead pharmacy postgraduate training

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) has hosted the first meeting of an Education Governance Oversight Board (EGOB) to oversee pharmacy postgraduate education and training.

Chaired by Peter Kopelman, who also chairs the RPS’s Faculty and Education Board (FEB), the EGOB includes the UK’s four chief pharmaceutical officers and representatives from the RPS, the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC), NHS Education and Training, universities and employers.

The meeting was held at the RPS’s London office on 27 September 2018. The RPS said the board “agreed the principles for its role in overseeing postgraduate education and training, and creating a flexible, adaptable workforce which can easily move between care settings and provide increasingly complex care”.

This will include the concept of a UK-wide foundation training programme, which was proposed by the FEB in 2017. The recommendation was included as part of the RPS’s response to Health Education England’s consultation, ‘Facing the facts, shaping the future: A draft health and care workforce strategy for England to 2027’, published in March 2018.

The RPS said the board will formalise to become the Pharmacy Postgraduate Training Board (PPTB) at a later date. The PPTB will ensure the quality of training pathways and ensure that pharmacy professionals are appropriately credentialed to guarantee patient safety. The PPTB will also maintain an “appropriate register of achievement”, the RPS added.

Ultimately, the PPTB aims to develop a defined career framework with training pathways from preregistration to foundation, and then to advanced practice and consultant pharmacists.

Following EGOB’s first meeting, Kopelman said the agreement to establish the PPTB was “important for the profession and crucial to the public who increasingly turn to pharmacists for health advice”.

Duncan Rudkin, chief executive and registrar of the GPhC, said he was looking forward to working with the board to “help make sure that pharmacists have the postgraduate training they need to respond with confidence to their changing roles and the changing needs of people using health services”.

Paul Bennett, chief executive of the RPS, said the Society viewed the creation of EGOB, and later the PPTB, as “key to securing and developing a future pharmacy workforce that is confident and competent to practise across a range of settings caring for patients with increasingly complex needs”.