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A major new initiative to help pharmacists and pharmacy technicians enhance their communication and consultation skills has been launched by the Centre for Pharmacy Postgraduate Education (CPPE) and Health Education England (HEE).

The consultation skills framework represents the beginning of a national programme of change in pharmacy, says CPPE director, Professor Christopher Cutts.

€The framework will apply to more than 60,000 pharmacy professionals across England. This includes pharmacists, pharmacy technicians and pre- registration pharmacy trainees. It also affects those who are training the next generation of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians.€

Key components

The main components of the framework are:

• A set of practice standards for consultation skills in pharmacy that outline the competencies that pharmacy professionals need to achieve in order to conduct consult- ations and public health interventions effectively
• A learning pathway, which individual pharmacy professionals can follow to develop the consultation skills they need. To coincide with the launch, a CPPE distance learning pack will be mailed to all pharmacists and pharmacy technicians in England
• A range of training formats (e.g. face-to-face learning, e-learning and printed workbooks). A variety of resources is available for learners, as well as for those who want to deliver learning, such as employers and local training organisations
• An assessment framework, which encourages pharmacy professionals to work through a self-assessment process to identify their learning needs. There is also an online assessment, which uses videoed consultations that pharmacy professionals can access to check their learning and development.

The resources can be accessed at www.consultationskillsforpharmacy.com.

COMMENTARY: WHY FRAMEWORK IS NEEDED

By CPPE tutor Reena Barai:

I can imagine many of you are rolling your eyes and thinking €“ why do I need to be taught how to do the obvious?

While there are many pharmacy professionals with great consultation skills, I am pretty sure every one of us can remember a consultation with a patient that hasn't gone as well as we would have liked.

It is also fair to say that most of us have never had any formal training on consultation skills and have relied wholly on our innate communication skills to get our message across to patients.

Our role and the services we provide are becoming increasingly patient-facing, be it over the counter or in our consulting rooms. We have to adopt a patient-centred approach if we are to rise to the challenge of supporting patients to optimise their medication and self-care.

Unfortunately time constraints are a potential barrier to adopting this approach. I would argue that by perfecting our consultation skills, especially some of the skills needed to close a consultation, we might actually become more effective and save time.

Historically many pharmacy professionals may have even avoided conducting consultations due to a fear of needing to be the perceived 'expert'. A patient-centred consultation is possibly less daunting as you actually have to listen more and talk less.

Above all there is the immense sense of job satisfaction you get from actually delivering patient-centred care and supporting a patient to achieve a better health outcome.