Ravi Sharma, director for England at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS), provided evidence to the Health and Social Care Select committee yesterday (May 24), during a session on workforce recruitment, training, and retention in health and social care.
Asked by MP for Coventry North West, Taiwo Owatemi, who is also a pharmacist, what “one change” the RPS would ask for, Mr Sharma said that a “really quick win” from a retention and recruitment perspective would be to pass a policy giving all pharmacists protected learning time so they can develop their skills “right here, right now”.
Read more: One in three pharmacists have considered leaving profession, RPS survey finds
“It’s one of the key factors” pharmacists are telling the RPS would “improve their wellbeing”, Mr Sharma added.
Last year, the RPS asked for a pilot on protected learning time led by Health Education and Improvement Wales to be replicated across Great Britain.
How can the government support the pharmacy workforce?
Mr Sharma pointed to actions the government could take to better support the pharmacy workforce. These include:
- Looking at pressures affecting the workforce and analysing the solutions to them.
- Publishing a “comprehensive” workforce strategy that includes “structured career development for pharmacists, wherever they might be working”.
- Sharing “more comprehensive” workforce data to help plan current and future needs of the workforce.
Read more: Why did the Home Office add pharmacists to the shortage occupation list?
Asked by Ms Owatemi what more could be done to protect pharmacy teams – following reports of abuse during the pandemic – Mr Sharma said that there needs to be a “stricter policy around abuse of any healthcare team”.
On top of that, “we need to engage with patients and the population to really [help them] understand the fantastic role that pharmacists and pharmacy teams play”, he commented.
Ms Owatemi asked Mr Sharma about the RPS’s stance on whether there is a shortage of pharmacists. She also asked him to share the RPS’s perspective on whether pharmacy should move to a “GP model…in which when a GP surgery shuts, then the GP surgery can be taken over”.
The RPS will address those questions separately, Mr Sharma said.
Last year, pharmacists were added to the government’s shortage occupation list, a decision some locum pharmacists and the PDA have questioned the validity of.
Catch up with C+D’s sixth Big Debate, which asked: Is there a shortage of community pharmacists?
