NHS England (NHSE) opened a tender on July 20 for a £360,000 contract to provide further clinical training for pharmacy technicians.
Community Pharmacy London (CPL) chief executive Conor Price told C+D it is an “immediate opportunity” for pharmacy technicians to “contribute more fully to services such as Pharmacy First”.
NHSE said the training is “required for patient safety” to “successfully implement the biggest reforms in pharmacy for decades”.
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The £360,000 contract is intended for the delivery of three two-year programmes in London.
“The training will support patient safety where pharmacy technicians are undertaking new services such as Pharmacy First,” NHSE said.
It added there is a need to “bridge the gap between initial education training to the level of clinical knowledge and skills required to meet service provision needs”.
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Price said CPL “welcomes investment in the development of pharmacy technicians, who are essential to making the best use of whole community pharmacy team as services expand”.
He added the training will have a “complementary function” to the raised GPhC standards for technicians that will come into force in 2029 and that NHSE could not “wait until a new generation has completed that training before developing the workforce needed for services today”.
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“This tender appears to offer targeted post-registration development for existing pharmacy technicians, particularly in patient-facing clinical skills such as consultation, history-taking, clinical observations, recognising red flags, safety-netting, record-keeping and appropriate escalation,” he added.
“The immediate opportunity is to enable technicians to contribute more fully to services such as Pharmacy First and to assume appropriate responsibilities elsewhere in the pharmacy, allowing pharmacists to devote more time to clinical consultations and complex care.”
London
He also said that “London’s scale, diversity and health inequalities make this development particularly valuable,” but he stressed that any focus on the capital “should not be interpreted as evidence that London’s existing technicians are less capable”.
“For the programme to succeed, it should be practical and linked to real service delivery, with supervised learning, meaningful assessment and clear governance. Employers will also need protected learning time and funded backfill,” he said.
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“Training is an important part of workforce transformation, but it cannot by itself compensate for vacancies, workload pressures or insufficient funding to release staff.”
It comes after the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) approved raising the minimum level of study for pharmacy technicians from level 3 to level 4 earlier this month.
And it follows the GPhC and NHSE appointing their first national pharmacy technician fellow last April.
