Student numbers cap 'too late'
In just one year's time pharmacy graduates could struggle to find pre-reg placements because of an oversupply of students, damaging the profession, education experts have warned
A cap on pharmacy student numbers will arrive too late to prevent oversupply damaging the profession, education experts have warned.
Pharmacy graduates could struggle to obtain pre-reg placements in just a year from now, which could deter high quality students from pursuing a career in the sector, argued employer, academic and student representatives at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) conference in Birmingham yesterday (September 7).
Despite the immediate threat, Health Education England plans to control pharmacy student numbers were likely to drag on until the 2016-17 academic year, and would "certainly not" come into force by the initial target date of 2015, said Mike Hannay, chair of the RPS's education expert advisory panel.
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He reported that most pharmacy bodies had supported proposals to limit the number of people entering pharmacy courses – one of three options put forward in a consultation by Health Education England (HEE) last year. But there had been "deafening silence" from HEE since and no details had emerged on how the plans would be implemented, making a delay inevitable, Mr Hannay said. Mr Hannay feared the number of students would outstrip the number of pre-reg placements well before the plans came into force. "Will it damage the profession? My view is certainly it will," he told the conference. Studying pharmacy could become "unattractive" to high quality students, he argued, and the top pharmacy schools would suffer because they would be unwilling to run "low grade" courses. Yvonne Perrie, head of Aston University's pharmacy school, said the lack of pre-reg places should have been discussed "three or four years ago" to avoid this scenario. Her university would be unwilling to lower its entry requirements, she said, because "weak students wouldn't survive" the degree programme. Marc Donovan, head of healthcare HR at Boots UK, said the problems could rear their head in just 12 months' time. "[Boots is] increasing places over the short term. We haven't seen swathes of graduates unable to get a placement yet...but I'm sure that will happen," he stressed. "There will be a bottleneck of people who won't be able to get pre-reg placements and… the difficulty is that will just accumulate," Mr Donovan warned. "That's a very dark view, but I think we're on that path." Katy Parsons, president of the British Pharmaceutical Students' Association, hit out at universities for continuing to recruit pharmacy students in the knowledge that some would be unable to complete their training. "It is fundamentally unfair to recruit a student onto a vocational course and remove their right [for an] opportunity to register as a pharmacist because there aren't enough training places available," she argued.
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