EXCLUSIVE

Day Lewis “should have done more” to prevent four in 10 of its pre-registration students from failing June’s registration exam, its chief executive has told C+D.

Only 59% of the chain’s 44 students passed the exam – the second-worst performance of the 11 largest community pharmacy training providers in Great Britain, according to data published by the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) in October.

Day Lewis chief executive officer Kirit Patel said the company had been “a bit complacent” about the exam. “I put my hands up, I don’t believe we did [enough],” Mr Patel said in an exclusive interview last week.

The overall pass rate for the June exam was 74% – the lowest since the GPhC became responsible for the assessment in 2010 – and Mr Patel said he did not realise how “stringent” it would be.

At Day Lewis’s annual conference last month, Mr Patel said the company had “earmarked a substantial budget” for pre-registration training, in a bid to secure a 100% pass rate next year.

"Immense resource" into training

The company is putting “immense resource” into making this a reality, including introducing extra teaching resources and training days, he added last week.

“As an employer and as a father of a pharmacist, I feel deeply for parents who put their children through pharmacy schools and then the system fails them. We have to do our bit,” he told C+D. There were a “variety of [other] reasons” for Day Lewis’s low June pass rate, including the “knock-on effect” of students who had left the chain up to two years before failing the exam, Mr Patel said.

GPhC findings from the June 2013 exam showed students from ethnic minorities had a lower pass rate than white British students, and Mr Patel pointed out that 80-90% of Day Lewis students come from non-white ethnic groups. These students could struggle in the exam if English is not their first language, he suggested.

What can training providers do to ensure a high pre-reg pass rate?

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