Welsh School of Pharmacy

N.B. This course is fully approved by the General Pharmaceutical Council as a recognised route of entry in the profession of pharmacy

Entry Requirements

Overview of the MPharm Programme  

There are four themes within the MPharm programme: chemistry, drug delivery, pharmacology and pharmacy practice. What they are and some of the ways they fit together are as follows.

Chemistry is concerned with the molecular properties of drugs – the active ingredients within medicines. It addresses the synthesis of drugs, their reactivity with other molecules and the analysis of drugs. Chemistry in a pharmacy context is overwhelmingly organic chemistry and is often specifically referred to as pharmaceutical or medicinal chemistry.

When the pharmacist has a safe and effective drug, a significant challenge is to get the drug to the correct place in the body, at the correct concentration and for the proper duration of time for it to have its therapeutic effect, to cure or relieve the patient. This is where the drug delivery theme comes in. The drug has to be incorporated with other (carrier) ingredients into a medicine. The medicine might be a tablet to be taken by mouth, it might be a cream to apply to the skin, or it could be a powder to be inhaled into the lungs. Drug delivery is concerned with the design and manufacture of these and the various other types of medicines; injections, eye drops, mixtures, etc.

Once the drug is delivered to its site of action in or on the body, there is the matter of how it works. Pharmacology is the study of the actions of drugs on living tissues. Obviously, on a pharmacy course the main interest is how drugs work for their curative effects on human patients but there is a sub-speciality in pharmacy of veterinary pharmacy and some pharmacists make their careers in this niche sector. Pharmacology and closely related topics constitute approximately 40% of the total MPharm programme. At its heart is the study of how drugs work at the molecular level but for the pharmacy student (as opposed to the student studying pure pharmacology) it is much more than that. The pharmacy student studies how the body works in health and disease (incorporating genetics, biochemistry, immunology, physiology, pathology and microbiology) to better understand how drugs have their therapeutic effects and are used with patients.

The completing theme of the MPharm programme is pharmacy practice, which is quite often referred to as clinical pharmacy. Pharmacy practice is perhaps best thought of as the study and development of skills in the interaction of the pharmacist with doctors, nurses and other health professionals, nonprofessional carers (family and friends) and most importantly patients themselves. Students learn to interpret and dispense prescriptions, to give advice on the use of medicines, to manage patients’ conditions by the use of medicines sold from the pharmacy or, increasingly, prescribed by the pharmacist her/himself.

Just as important as the four individual subject themes of the MPharm programme is how they fit together, what we call inter-disciplinarity. The chemistry of a drug, its chemical properties, e.g. its solubility, has a profound effect on its delivery to its site of action in the body. Drug chemistry also influences the pharmacological actions of a drug. A change in a functional group on a drug molecule can greatly affect its potency or the nature and severity of its potential side effects. There is a very close interaction of drug delivery and pharmacology in the matter of how drugs are absorbed, distributed around the body, metabolised and eventually excreted. Understanding from pharmacology is useful, indeed vital, in pharmacy practice. From pharmacology one can anticipate, for example, interactions between drugs that a patient is taking, with beneficial or potentially problematic outcomes.

In the design of our programme and in the way that we teach we continually make and explain these connections. This inter-disciplinarity can be challenging but for many students this is one of the things they want from or come to enjoy about studying pharmacy with us.

On the next page you can see the pattern of modules that make up our MPharm curriculum. Beyond Year 1 module marks will contribute to your degree classification; 20% from Year 2, 30% from Year 3 and 50% from the final year.