Since I joined in January as Director of Education, it has been a transformative period for pharmacy professional leadership. These first months have brought several significant milestones for the organisation and for pharmacists: the launch of the royal college in April, the first cohort of newly qualified prescribing pharmacists into the workforce; and the launch of our new enhanced curriculum and credentialing pathway earlier this week. 

These developments sit alongside a wider period of change across pharmacy, including evolving roles across Scotland, England and Wales, and changes across governments. Taken together, they underline the pace of change across the profession and the importance of ensuring that education and assessment keep step with emerging needs. 

It has been an energising and rewarding start, and an incredible opportunity to get to know the organisation, learn more about the education and assessment needs of pharmacists, and consider how engagement with the wider pharmacy community can help us better support these needs and deliver improvements to practice and patient care. 

Reflections 

One key reflection from my first six months is how impressed I’ve been at the range of high-quality education we already offer across all off our different platforms and formats. There is a lot more than I had been aware of before joining the organisation, much of it available for members only, and less visible to the world outside.  

Our educational formats and options are wide-ranging, and I’m keen to work to make them more understandable and accessible in one place. For example, with our recent focus on newly qualified pharmacists, we are bringing together education from across RCPharm Learn (housing our e-learning modules), the PJ, our standards and guidance, resources on our website , including frameworks and toolkits , and access to our On-Demand webinars.  We’ll be supplementing this comprehensive hub with more case studies, webinars and events over the next year. This is serving the important purpose of supporting newly qualified pharmacists at a key moment – and is a good example of how we can do this more. As we continue to develop, this approach provides opportunities to make the work we do across education and assessment more visible.  

Strategy direction 

Education will be central to the College’s strategy as it develops. Drawing on my previous experiences, and in the context of the new royal college’s important professional leadership role, I want to ensure all pharmacists are able to access the training and support they need when they need it, and, crucially, that they can do so in ways that work for them.  

Achieving this requires us to draw on all the sources of expertise at our disposal. That includes the knowledge and experience of our staff teams, collaborators, stakeholders and advisory bodies, as well as horizon-scanning across developments in education and in pharmacy policy, science and medicines development, to consider what good practice will look like in future. A good example of this kind of work is coming up later this month, when our policy team will host a roundtable on AI in pharmacy education and training. 

Developments like AI mean that this essential work will always be on-going. The wider environment, educational practices and the professional field will always change, so our education can never stay still – it must always continue to evolve as practice develops.  

Creating high-quality education and assessment is an essential part of our work, but only a part of it. We need to look to the future and develop a vision for what pharmacists need to know and do to stay at the forefront of practice. We need to engage with members and the wider profession to ensure that we are delivering the kind of education people need,  in the way they want it. What I’ve learned from previous work in the postgraduate education space is that busy professionals already have jobs to do; we need to make sure the education they are getting from us is relevant, adds value to their day-to-day lives and is delivered when and where they need it.  

Showing what’s possible 

The launch of the Enhanced curriculum and credentialing pathway offers a powerful example of the way in which this kind of collaborative approach and comprehensive stakeholder engagement can deliver meaningful  educational  support for pharmacists. Led by us and developed with pharmacists, employers, educators, patient  representatives  and partners from across all sectors and the four UK nations, it provides a shared framework for developing towards enhanced practice that reflects the collective expertise and aspirations of the profession. 

We have worked closely with employers, educators and national partners to align programmes, support and resources. This will enable newly qualified pharmacists entering their first roles to build essential experience, confidence and professional judgement as both pharmacists and prescribers. By supporting structured development through real-world practice, the pathway will help pharmacists deliver safe, high-quality care, while giving employers and the wider health system greater assurance and strengthening patient safety through credentialing. 

The collaborative work that has gone into developing the new pathway, credential and supporting education is emblematic of what we can do together for pharmacy education more generally. As a royal college, we are at the heart of the pharmacy ecosystem. There is great potential to achieve more by collaborating with others, as our voices together are stronger than they are alone. 

As I look to the future for pharmacy education and our role within it, I’m particularly mindful of the need to hear from members and pharmacists from across the profession – at all career stages and across community pharmacy, general practice and other NHS settings. It’s through this engagement that we will be able to design education and assessment that works for professionals, and brings the most benefit to our members, professionals and patients. With all this change and still only six months in, I’m excited about what else is possible, and look forward to meeting many of you at events in the coming months, including our own conference in November.

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