If you think education is expensive, try ignorance

The news that Health Education England is to shed 315 full-time equivalent posts in order to reduce its running costs by 30% is not a surprise, but must raise questions about the future education and training of NHS staff.

Nobody seriously thinks that a four year university course can ever provide all the information anyone will need for a successful career in pharmacy; and while the recent proposals for revalidation from the General Pharmaceutical Council perhaps represent a more practical approach than GPhC has hitherto taken, it does not concern itself with who – if anyone – is going to provide the training that pharmacists and technicians realise they need. That is not GPhC’s business. Registrants will just have to sort something out.

There are, of course, plenty of one day courses – we run some ourselves under the PM Academy banner – but perhaps part of the great success of CLIP in Scotland has been that participants have seen a structure for their training that makes achieving their educational goals much easier than having to compile a basket of offerings. As we roll CLIP out to Ireland (don’t worry, Wales and England, you’re next!) we’ve learned from the Scottish experience and we’ll do it even better.

We’re committed to making our educational opportunities as useful as we can. When you book one of our events you can be sure that we will do everything possible to make it so, and your feedback really helps, because we use that to tweak it for future events.

One of the key features of our partnerships with various bodies is to provide top class education. Their reputation is your guarantee of quality. We are confident that they would not want to be associated with anything that was inadequate.

And we must not forget our peer-reviewed journals. Their independent editor ensures that everything is done in the right way.

While other bodies are contracting Pharmacy Management is going from strength to strength. We must be doing something right!

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