#trainee pharmacist

I am a trainee pharmacist and I noticed you’re studying something after qualifying.

I was wondering what post grad education means for a qualified pharmacist?

Thank you!

Hi anon, thanks for the ask! Hope you’re enjoying being a trainee pharmacist.

I’m going to mainly discuss hospital here because that’s my sector but there’s definitely similar opportunities elsewhere!

You can do so many things once you’re qualified! The usual route is to do clinical diploma, which is 2 years of part time postgrad distance learning that is supported by your employer and includes coursework and exams. In the NHS you pretty much need this to get promotions, less so in primary care. Once you’ve done this, or as part of your diploma, you can undertake your prescribing course. This is about 6 months, and involves shadowing others and choosing an area to become a prescriber in, coursework and exams. In hospital you’d choose your specialist area for either ward based or clinic prescribing, but in community you could do so many things and provide such a valuable service to patients. If you wanted to go into GP land after this, you’d be able to do things such as running clinics for primary care patients. I think there’s a community pharmacy in Scotland where they prescribe things for patients after doing health reviews with them? There’s infinite things to do out there, I find it so exciting!!

I don’t know much about education beyond that, especially primary care. However in hospital, you can go on to do teaching courses to help you become education and training leads, or someone I know is doing a masters in anticoag to become a consultant anticoag pharmacist. You could do advanced clinical practice to get much more hands on (think taking bloods etc). There’s literally so many things you can do, the world is your oyster!

Also, if you don’t want a whole course to commit to, but want to learn something, the CPPE (or Welsh/Scottish equivalent??) is a wonderful resource. You wanna learn about literally any clinical topic? They’ve got a pack for you. For CPD or general improvement of your knowledge, I can’t recommend them enough.

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