DPP shortage: ‘Excess’ pharmacy trainee places ‘on the face of it’, says GPhC chief
The pharmacy regulator has said that “there is an excess of places” for trainees – as long as placement providers can “actually make good and deliver on the new requirements” for DPPs.
“On the face of it, there is an excess of places” on offer for trainee pharmacists in England, General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) chief executive Duncan Rudkin said this weekend (September 8).
Speaking at the annual Avicenna conference in London, Rudkin told delegates that the number of places listed on Oriel, the application system for pharmacy training places in England, “is 4,770 against a likely demand of 3,600”.
He said that this “sounds fine, provided those places, or three-quarters of them, can actually make good and deliver on the new requirements”.
From 2025/26, trainee placement providers will have to provide a designated prescribing practitioner (DPP) so that all trainees qualify as an independent prescriber (IP).
Rudkin added that “one of the things” keeping the regulator “awake at the minute is working with NHS England (NHSE) and others to make sure that those DPPs are there to provide the supervision”.
He said that NHSE has spoken with placement providers who have outlined “some detail” of their plans “for provision of DPP supervision…which gives a level of assurance”.
But he added that there is another “category of employers who have offered places in the system, who so far have not shown any evidence that they have actually got a plan for having access to the DPP for their training”.
He stressed that those trainee placement providers must be “thinking about that DPP readiness, so that the pipeline of pharmacists can continue to come through”.
DPP drama
It comes after various sector bodies have expressed their concerns about a shortage of DPPs.
In May, the Company Chemists’ Association (CCA) demanded that NHSE provide “a list of all organisations” that have spare DPPs as it voiced “grave concerns” that “pharmacies will be unable to secure” them.
And in June, C+D revealed that large multiples will be the lead employer on only 277 of the 4,102 placements available for the 2025/26 cohort of pharmacy trainees.
Meanwhile last month, the Pharmacists’ Defence Association (PDA) warned against apparent proposals to make DPP supervision “a routine responsibility” and part of a pharmacist’s “normal job without considering job evaluation or pay”.
At the time, it deemed suggestions of baking the role into job descriptions as “troubling”.
