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Universities' recruitment of pharmacy undergraduates is sensible and effective, but amounts to little if pre-registration training is a poor experience, said the president of the British Pharmaceutical Students' Association.

Katy Parsons told delegates: €The tipping point is the pre-reg tutor. If they have lost their way and have no motivation, this gets passed onto the student.€ While qualified pharmacists had leaders within the profession they could look to for inspiration, the pre-registration year after the encouragement students received at university needs addressing, she said, describing this period as €the gap in the middle€.

Ash Soni, vice-chair of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society's English Pharmacy Board, said: €New pharmacists start out enthusiastically but it gets beaten out on day one or week one when they get told to sort prescriptions and count tablets.€ But this was how pharmacies got paid, he offered as way of explanation, stating: €The contract doesn't help.€

Mr Soni suggested that the RPS had a role in providing mentoring and education programmes to pre-reg tutors so they were better equipped to provide support and encouragement, much in the same way the RPS does for pharmacists once they have qualified.

Locum pharmacist and Guardian columnist Peter Dawson put forward the notion that pharmacy needed to change both its entry requirements and its syllabus, much as medicine has done in recent years.

€There is a high proportion of pharmacy graduates who possess more academic acumen than communication acumen,€ he said, describing how offering pharmacy undergraduate places to individuals who were more focused on care than science might be a way of ensuring the right type of person entered the profession.