Scaling Up the Pharmacy Workforce and Evolving Role of the Pharmacist in the UK

Transformative scaling up of health professionals’ education and training is defined as the sustainable expansion and reform
of health professionals’ education and training to increase the quantity, quality and relevance of health professionals, and in so
doing strengthen the country health systems and improve population health outcomes.
To develop the capacity of the pharmacy workforce we need:
Sufficient funding.
Adequate training facilities.
Right pharmacy staff, with the right skills, in the right place, at the right time in the right numbers.
National policies and plans.
Needs based workforce development.
Pharmacy workers roles are evolving worldwide and pharmacy education needs to be flexible enough to respond to educational
needs. The education system needs to have the flexibility to respond to the evolving nature of the profession, as roles become
more clinical. In order to meet current and future needs, existing CPD and postgraduate programmes should be developed to
enhance competencies. Transforming and scaling-up health professionals’ education is required to attain the right mix of skills
and competencies of health professionals who can respond to ever changing and evolving needs of populations around the world.
We need to move from a traditional focus on tertiary hospitals to initiatives that foster community engagement i.e. move away
from developing advanced specialists to advanced generalists. From day 1 as a student to career end the Royal Pharmaceutical
Society has: Programmes of support underpinned by evidence based frameworks.