20 21

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Figure 4.1. Needs-based professional educational model (PET 2008-present)

The global workforce needs to be competent, capable, adaptable, and oriented to a medicinescentered, patient-focused approach, with development and professional practice, centred on the tenets of needs-based education [2-5].

For health care professionals, the capability to improve therapeutic outcomes, patients quality of life, scientific advancement, and public health imperatives is dependent on a foundation of sound education and training [3]. Likewise, a capable practitioner workforce is an essential pre-requisite for all health care professions, and pharmacy is no exception. Evolving roles towards more patientfocused service provision have been a steady trend in the last two decades. Modern, contemporary forms of initial education and training are vital for professions to be able to meet the increasingly complex health care demands of populations [4-7]. Additionally, there is a need to understand national priorities and the resource requirements and constraints that are present in all national economies, and to be able to describe the context and need for pharmacy education within these economies. Globally, this requires a coordinated and multi-system approach to the continued development of intelligent planning, supply, and initial and advanced training and education to prepare the pharmacy workforce for such roles.

When using the term pharmacy education, it is to be understood that this refers to the educational design and capacity to develop the workforce for a diversity of settings (e.g. community, hospital, research and development, academia) across varying levels of service provision and competence (e.g. pharmacy support staff/ workforce, pharmacists and pharmaceutical scientists) and scope of education (e.g. undergraduate, post-graduate, life-long learning). This multi-dimensional conceptualization embodies a systematic approach to education development that enables and supports a capable and flexible workforce to provide access to medicines expertise and to effectively improve the health of nations.

Pharmacy education worldwide continues to have many issues that challenge the quality of teaching and learning at a time when there are limited resources to meet these challenges. The data in this report provides evidence that there is a global

scarcity of qualified pharmacists to provide patient care at a time when there are more opportunities for pharmacists to expand their roles and responsibilities [8]. From this perspective, pharmacy is no different from other health care professions. FIPEd and the associated Pharmacy Education Taskforce (PET), advocates for professional needs-based education, working in partnership with the UNESCO and WHO [6,7].

PET currently oversees the implementation of the Work Plan 2011/2012, which continues the work initially developed by the 2008-2010 Action Plan [1,9]. The Work Plan is oriented towards identifying locally-determined needs and using this information to facilitate comprehensive education development and achievement of the competencies required to provide the local services (Figure 4.1). The domains for action prioritised in the work plans relate to developing a pharmacy education vision and framework, preparing the pharmacy workforce, and integrating quality assurance and education leadership for these efforts. From these domains, five project teams have been created to support the areas of (1) vision and competency, (2) academic and institutional capacity, (3) quality assurance, (4) pharmacy support worforce, and (5) educational leadership. The leadership for these project teams comes from PET, which serves as the coordination, analysis, and dissemination hub. It includes both a core of key stakeholders and a dynamic shell of voluntary regional collaborators.

4.2 Pharmacy education capacity and training institution distribution

The supply side of the workforce capacity pipeline is clearly important, and valid data about institutional capacity for providing initial education and training are critical in order to provide workforce intelligence for the profession. This section aims to provide comparative data on the supply side capacity challenges in order to provide indicators for planning at global and regional levels. The data presented here are concerned with capacity; competence and quality are dealt with in subsequent sections. It is clear that nations will need sufficient numbers of students in initial education programmes to provide for a future capable workforce; in addition, the academic establishment data also need to be determined. Without an adequate academic workforce, there cannot be a competent and capable health care workforce.

Education-related data from this survey are derived from a total of 90 country/territory level responses across a number of variables. Three countries in our sample reported they had no university-based schools of pharmacy and 14 (19%) reported only a single national pharmacy school. Conversely USA reported 127 accredited schools and India reported 1400. The sample reported a total of 2347 schools of pharmacy from 82 countries and territories, of which 1568 were reported as accredited. The reported academic workforce (as a proportion of the total pharmacy workforce) ranges from 0.1% (China) to 35.7% (Cameroon) with a sample mean of 5.2% of the workforce.

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VISION Education:

completed by the pharmacy workforce to achieve these services

Needs:

Local, regional, national & international

Services:

provided by the pharmacy workforce to meet these needs

Competencies:

demonstrated by the pharmacy workforce to provide these services

Quality assured

Locally determined

Socially accountable

Globally connected

NEEDS-BASED PROFESSIONAL EDUCATIONAL MODEL

.................................................................................

The respondents reported a total of 58,239 (n=54 countries and territories) pharmacy graduates per year, with a sample mean of 71.4 graduates per year per school. Figure 4.2 shows the country and territory level production of newly qualified graduate pharmacists per year (for available data).

There is a strong correlation with numbers of institutions providing initial pharmacy education and the country and territory level population. Institutional and national infrastructures for pharmacy education and training tend to be aligned with population size, although many African nations are situated below the regression line (Figure 4.4). The Figure 4.5 illustrates the total number of pharmacy schools and total number of pharmacy technician training schools (n= 46 countries and territories).

There is also variance associated with length of education and training programmes leading up to registration. Figure 4.3 shows both the length of time for the full-time undergraduate period and any additional time for internship (or pre-registration) periods before licensing of the practitioner.

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Figure 4.2. Country and territory level graduates in pharmacy per year (Egypt = 480, not included in figure due to scaling)

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Figure 4.3. Undergraduate and internship periods of initial education for pharmacists (n=82 countries and territories)

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