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Meeting new standards for pharmacy professionals

Duncan Rudkin, chief executive and registrar for the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC), writes about the new standards for pharmacy professionals.

One of the most important responsibilities the pharmacy regulator has is to ensure that the people who use pharmacy services have confidence in those services and in the pharmacists and pharmacy technicians who provide them. Accordingly, one of our most important jobs at the GPhC is to set standards for pharmacy professionals that support professionalism, person-centred care and high-quality outcomes. 

Mindful of this obligation, and against the backdrop of profound changes occurring in healthcare and in the roles of pharmacy professionals, we undertook an important body of work to research, consult on and develop new standards for pharmacy professionals.   

This work included extensive outreach and engagement both within and outside of pharmacy.  We sought the views of pharmacy professionals and the groups that represent and support them, healthcare professionals and professional bodies, government representatives, members of the public and groups that support patients. We asked them to tell us how they defined professionalism, and how it should be expressed in patient care. A key takeaway for us was that the attitudes and behaviours of pharmacy professionals play the most important role in delivering safe and effective patient care.  

The insights we gleaned from this work informed our new approach to the standards and how they support safe and effective care. Most notably, the new standards for pharmacy professionals are less prescriptive, having been reduced from 57 to nine. And they rely less on detailed guidance and more on the knowledge, skills and expertise of pharmacy professionals. First and foremost, they place a more explicit emphasis on person-centred care and the needs of patients. 

The new standards also have the flexibility to support professionalism both individually and amongst the whole team. They should be embedded in everyday practice. They are meant to inform professional decision-making and serve as a springboard to get professionals to discuss professionalism with their colleagues. They are meant to be used as a yardstick for pharmacy professionals to reflect on their own practice and the practice of other professionals. For employers, the standards serve to underscore their important role to enable and support the registrants working for them by providing an environment where professionalism can flourish. 

Finally, in light of high-profile failures of care and professionalism in recent years, the standards introduce an updated and clear articulation of our expectations around leadership, and how they apply to the entire pharmacy team (not just those with management responsibilities); along with a commitment to openness, candour and acknowledging mistakes. Underpinning all of this is a call for greater accountability on the part of pharmacy professionals to their patients and colleagues.  

Accountability means not only adhering to the standards, but continuing to meet them throughout a pharmacy professional’s career. So, the standards will also serve as the benchmark against which pharmacy professionals will be asked to provide evidence that they are keeping their knowledge and skills up to date. 

Alongside the work on standards for pharmacy professionals, we have been working on a meaningful way to provide this evidence and reassurance by introducing revalidation. Our approach to revalidation is geared specifically for pharmacy, but includes two important components used in other professions – peer discussion and reflective accounts – that our research shows are especially potent in improving the quality of care to patients and in instilling professional confidence and satisfaction. We have recently closed our consultation on revalidation and will report on the findings shortly. 

Both of these programmes of work represent years of research, testing, evaluation and direct collaboration with pharmacy professionals, members of the public, and, importantly, other health professionals. Both are grounded in timeless principles around serving the public, lifelong learning and professional accountability – principles that I know are shared by other health professions. And both embody our duty – as a regulator of health professionals – to ensure that these principles remain at the core of pharmacy practice now and in the future.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

The new standards for pharmacy professionals can be accessed at:

W: www.pharmacyregulation.org/spp