Professional standards and frameworks
Our professional standards support you to better your own practice. They help you, your team and your organisation to improve patient safety, shape future services and deliver high-quality care across all settings and sectors. Our frameworks support you to develop and demonstrate your professional practice.
Here’s an RPS (now RCPharm) and GPhC joint statement Using standards to help provide safe and effective care for members of the public, which demonstrates the importance of using and applying professional standards.
Professional standards
Frameworks
Guidance and toolkits
Professional standards
Safe and secure handling of medicines
Our guidance on the safe and secure handling of medicines (SSHM) is widely used in hospital and other settings.
These eight standards benchmark good practices and support the audit of Hospital at Home services across the UK.
These updated standards establish a comprehensive framework defining high quality care in homecare services.
See also: handbook appendices.
Daffodil standards for end of life care
Our RPS (now RCPharm)/Marie Curie UK quality improvement (daffodil) standards are based on the work completed by the Royal College of General Practitioners.
Click here to sign up for our Daffodil Standards.
The professional standards for hospital pharmacy services set out what good pharmacy care looks like across NHS and independent healthcare settings.
See also the handbook, background and supporting resources.
Patient safety professional standards
These professional standards provide a framework to help pharmacy teams respond to patient safety incidents, improve services and deliver consistently high-quality care.
See also the background and supporting resources.
These joint standards set out quality assurance requirements for aseptic preparation services.
For healthcare professionals and organisations to understand polypharmacy and support patients who are prescribed multiple medicines.
These professional standards support safe, patient-centred medicines optimisation in secure environments.
Benchmarking metrics for acute hospitals
RCPharm has developed standardised definitions to support consistent benchmarking of pharmacy services in acute hospitals.
Frameworks
Prescribing competency framework
Developed and updated to support prescribers to continually improve their performance and work safely and effectively.
See also the background and supporting tools.
We’ve worked with multi-disciplinary experts to develop and publish a competency framework for designated prescribing practitioners (DPP).
Pharmacogenomic resources: supporting the competency framework for all prescribers
Supports prescribers to build and expand your PGx competence.
See also the background and supporting resources.
Leadership development framework
Leadership is a key element of the professional development and practice of pharmacists and pharmaceutical scientists.
The RCPharm leadership development framework outlines the behaviours of effective, engaging leadership.