By Marcia Reid, RPS Programme Manager

Project aim and our approach

The number of pharmacist prescribers is growing, and this has been accelerated, as from the 2025/26 cohort of Foundation Trainees, all newly registered pharmacists will be qualified in prescribing. The RPS are keen to provide additional support and guidance to this growing group in our profession and the project to develop this proposition started in July 2023. Through 1-2-1 interviews, workshops and surveys, we explored how changing roles have impacted pharmacists and how they are developing their competencies to include prescribing. We listened to prescribers in all sectors, to ensure our offering matched their needs.

What prescribers want

Unsurprisingly, our research showed that pharmacist prescribers want easily accessible information with guidance and support along their career pathway, and we could break down their requirements into three major areas:

Professional Development:

• Training to upskill and widen scope
• Webinars and events
• Practical skills (e.g. confidence building)
• Clinical skills
• Maintaining competencies
• DPP specific education

Current Awareness

• Position statements and policy updates
• Prescribing news
• DPP/Clinical supervision issue
• Intelligence/ feedback
• Peer engagement and local events

Guidance and Support

• Expanded prescribing chapter in Medicines, Ethics and Practice (MEP)
• Competency frameworks
• Dedicated resource for prescribers
• ‘Someone to call’ for prescriber support
• Guidance on how to find a DPP                                                                         

How we responded

Some support and guidance (such as the competency frameworks) already existed, but we wanted to make this easy to access.

The project to build the proposition included workstreams based on the three key areas for development and a working group with external advisers.

In October 2023, we launched a dedicated prescribing section in the RPS website - www.rpharms.com/prescribing. This site was mapped for pharmacists to find support and information wherever they are along their prescribing career pathway such as ‘Becoming a prescriber’, ‘Working as a prescriber’, and ‘Develop your prescribing practice’.

We developed learning programmes mapped to competency frameworks and created live links to prescribing updates in the Pharmaceutical Journal. All of these services are beautifully summarised in a brief video on the home page of the prescribing section of the RPS website.

Our results and conclusions

• 100,000 unique visitors to dedicated web pages in the first 12 months
• 25% increase in prescribing members of the RPS
• 50,000 users of the Competency Framework for all Prescribers
• 3,000 downloads of the new prescriber checklist
• Some great feedback

‘User-friendly – everything we need in one place’ Community pharmacist prescriber

‘A fabulous resource – use it all the time’ -  Senior Clinical Pharmacist

This is a fast-moving environment, and we will continue to develop the proposition. By monitoring the traffic to the web pages and attendance at educational events, we can collect real-time information on the resources of most value to prescribers. This informs the ongoing programme development and enables us to assess our progress.

We will continue to develop these services, and we launched the prescriber support line in May 2024.    

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