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Record learning outcomes

By Alexander Humphries

My dispenser is in the final stages of her NVQ3 qualification and it's been hard work €“ for both of us.

I'D LIKE TO SAY that I had forgotten how much work was involved in tutoring the technician qualification but in truth I had simply blanked it out as a post-traumatic experience.

If you've ever tutored a student through NVQ3 you will know what I mean: there is a constant barrage of questions on the knowledge component, some of which leave me thinking, €I used to know all about covalent bonds€¦€

The skills or evidence component is no better. We're constantly looking for specific scenarios or reviewing evidence forms, which often require quite a lot of input to get them to the required standard. Tutoring a pre-reg is much less work.

Invaluable

Good support staff are clearly invaluable. They are our shop window to customers and patients, the engine room for the NHS business and our ears in the local community, so it is right that we invest some time in developing them. With the annual Which? hunt we need to beef up training for medicines counter assistants or else we run the risk of losing our status as guardians of the P category. Certainly some form of regular refresher training or re-accreditation would seem to be appropriate.

The reality at present is that someone on the medicines counter may originally have had a training qualification from the 1970/80s and not done any training since. This is unacceptable given the number of POM to P switches and increased level of scrutiny nowadays.

One qualification that feels about right is the dispensary assistant level. The GPhC has other ideas, however, and is keen to see us push on to the higher level NVQ3, which is a real problem as far as I am concerned.

Since the registration of pharmacy technicians began a few years ago, there has been a lot of uncertainty about their USP. In reality they can't do much more than a dispensary assistant, yet they take four times as long and cost more to train and employ, and carry with them additional professional baggage €“ CPD requirements, questionable professional accountability, and may require their own indemnity insurance. Why would any community pharmacist want to employ a pharmacy technician? 

There are those in the profession who would like to see registered technicians given more responsibility for the operation of a pharmacy. Regardless of my personal feelings on the issue, I'm afraid it is the employment market that will determine the outcome of that debate. The market is becoming saturated with pharmacy graduates and, as a consequence, pharmacist salaries are falling.

Add into the mix the fact that salaries for hospital pharmacy technicians are grossly out of balance with their community cousins, which creates problems regarding the recruitment and retention of technicians in community pharmacy, and I just cannot see any community pharmacy employer choosing to employ a technician over a newly qualified pharmacist.

What we need is a review of the training requirements for registered technicians to make them less onerous, more attainable, and most importantly, more useful for community pharmacy and employers.

They can't do much more than a dispensary assistant

Useful roles

So what roles could they fulfil that would benefit community pharmacy? Perhaps the most obvious one would be total management of the supply chain, meaning no more pharmacists phoning around trying to obtain stock restricted by quotas. Accuracy checking is now widely accepted, so no real problem there, as long as there is clarity from the GPhC about where accountability lies.

Practice management and quality assurance is a weakness for a lot of pharmacists so, if training addressed areas such as the pharmacy contract in more detail, we could delegate swathes of this work to our technicians.

I'd be quite happy to see technicians running audits, writing SOPs for technical processes and dealing with the NHS reimbursement system. And I can see some real patient safety benefits from delegating some quality assurance functions to them. In my pharmacy we have run dispensing accuracy exercises to understand where mistakes are most likely to come from. I can also see my technician coaching newer members of the team or those who might be struggling.

Having said all that, I am actually looking forward to my dispenser emerging from her chrysalis because there is a mountain of work I can throw her way. I am sure we will be able to navigate through these issues as I trust her, which is the basis of all multi-professional working.