The General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) has urged recent graduates to complete its second annual survey of pre-registration placements to help it improve the standard of training.

A link to the survey was being emailed yesterday (July 30) to all trainee pharmacists who undertook pre-registration training in 2013-14 and sat the registration exam last month, the regulator said. It would allow pharmacists to rate their overall training experience as well as the feedback and supervision they received from their tutor, the GPhC told C+D.

GPhC chief executive Duncan Rudkin said the results would help the regulator "further explore" some of the findings from last year's survey, published last month, which found discrepancies in training quality between different regions and sectors.

"The higher the response rate, the better we will be able to understand the quality of their pre-registration training and the challenges and opportunities they experience," he said.

The GPhC worked with a specialist research team from the universities of Bradford and Keele as well as market research company Information by Design to create the survey, it said.

The survey, which should take 20 minutes to complete, was anonymous and would not be linked to pharmacists' registration or fitness to practise, the regulator stressed. The results would be made public in spring 2015, it said.

Pre-registration tutors would be surveyed later this year and the GPhC also planned to survey pre-registration trainee pharmacy technicians next year, it added.

Last month, the results of the GPhC's first pre-registration survey revealed that 18 per cent of students in London rated the quality of support they had received as ‘poor' or ‘very poor', compared to only 2 per cent in Scotland. The survey of 905 recent graduates also found that 12 per cent of community pharmacist trainees described their placements as ‘poor', compared to 7 per cent of hospital pharmacy trainees.

At the time, the GPhC pledged to investigate these discrepancies and told C+D it planned to set out concrete learning outcomes for trainees by 2015 and full standards for pre-registration training by 2016.

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