Multisector pre-registration pharmacy training
18 March 2022
Last month, the CUREMeDE team completed their evaluation of the 2020/21 multisector pre-registration pharmacy training programme across two Health Boards in Wales.
Multisector training programmes provide pharmacists with training exposure in hospital, community and primary care settings over 12-months. This is in contrast to traditional, single-sector programmes in either hospital or community settings.
The team have been involved in evaluating several multisector programmes implemented by Health Education and Improvement Wales (HEIW) in recent years. Different trainee cohorts have experienced different models of training, varying in terms of the timing, organisation, and duration of experience across the three pharmacy sectors.
After promising results from previous evaluation studies, HEIW are looking to explore the feasibility of moving to a single model of multisector training with a defined curriculum. For the 2020/21 study, our evaluation therefore focused specifically on the strengths and limitations of two distinct training models and the extent to which they facilitate the achievement of the programme curriculum.
In one model, trainees completed 2-month block rotations across the three sectors in the first six-months of their training and then revisited each sector for a second 2-month rotation in the second half of the year. In the other model, trainees completed 4-month block rotations in the three sectors in sequence.
Our results demonstrated the diversity of views and experiences of trainees and supervisors both between and within the two training models. This diversity was due to a number of factors: differences across pharmacy sectors and training sites, the availability and readiness of supervisors and also the characteristics of the trainees themselves.
Neither training model came out as a clear-cut preferences and our evaluation report presents the context and detail around the influential factors.
Download the Executive Summary. The full report is available upon request.