MCA training and quality of advice was put under the spotlight at the 2014 SMART Conference, hosted by Training Matters’ stablemate Pharmacy Magazine and supported by Pharmacy Voice and the PAGB, as leaders argued that it is time for change. Asha Fowells reports

Not updating the training requirements for medicines counter assistants (MCAs) for 18 years has led to huge variation in pharmacy standards, Lloyds pharmacy superintendent Steve Howard (pictured) told the SMART conference.

The inconsistency that exists throughout community pharmacy is not helped by the absence of any continuing professional development requirement for MCAs, continued Mr Howard, who is also quality and regulatory director at Lloyd pharmacy’s parent company Celesio UK and visiting professor at the University of Huddersfield’s School of Pharmacy. “There is some really good practice going on up and down the country, but it just isn’t consistent, which is why the customer experience is so variable,” he said.

Mr Howard’s comments followed a presentation by Joanna Pearl, principal health researcher at Which?, who defended last year’s investigation into pharmacies as “statistically significant”, “robust” and “representative of the sector”. Ms Pearl said that mystery shopping exercises conducted by Which? over the last decade demonstrated that MCAs and independent pharmacies tended to offer inferior advice on medicines to customers than pharmacists and those working in multiples.

However, it was unclear where the problems stemmed from, she said, asking: “Is it about training for MCAs or quality assurance? Is it about what MCAs know or is it about how they do it?” As well as the question of MCA training being out of date, other suggestions in response to Ms Pearl’s questions included the WWHAM questions being used so rigidly that staff were unable to think outside the sales protocol and about the patient rather than just the symptoms.

Training Matters approached the General Pharmaceutical Council, which accredits pharmacy support staff training, for comment on the matter. A spokesperson said: “This issue has been discussed by the Council recently and it has been agreed that the GPhC will undertake a review of these training courses from 2014-16, which will look at how the training for pharmacy staff could be improved, particularly in the area of giving advice to patients.”

The spokesperson for the regulator added that pharmacy owners and superintendents are responsible for meeting set standards, which include a requirement that staff have the appropriate skills, qualifications and competence for their role, or are being supervised if they are being trained, and that this was included in the visits made to pharmacies by GPhC inspectors.

In response to Steve Howard’s comment about the failure to update the training requirements for nearly two decades, the GPhC stated that it had ‘adopted’ the situation from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) when the latter organisation lost its regulatory role in 2010. An RPS spokesman commented: “All aspects of pharmacy practice, including the competence of staff, should be subject to a continuous cycle of quality improvement and we will be providing a resource for members soon on quality systems to help with this.

“How pharmacists and their teams approach this is a matter of professional judgement and the approach will differ dependent on the team and the setting. All approaches though should contain the golden thread of a focus on delivering better patient care.”