With more focus being put on the role of the pharmacy technician, Tess Fenn looks at how the profession can be best utilised to improve patient care

Last month I wrote about revalidation and what this proposed change to continuing professional development (CPD) will mean. One aspect of this that will not change is that our CPD records need to connect to our pharmacy technician roles and scope of practice.  

The new professional standards, anchored within ‘safe and effective care’, provide all GPhC registrants, both pharmacy technicians and pharmacists, with examples of how we can show we are doing this. As we know, the standards themselves indicate what our patients and the public can expect from us as we go about our daily work.

Our role

So, for pharmacy technicians, where do we work and what do we do? This may seem an obvious question and you may wonder why it is being asked. But we are continuously asked this by both the Government and the profession, to see how pharmacy technicians can be best utilised within the pharmacy team. 

The reality is, pharmacy technicians work in so many different areas that setting out our role is no easy feat. Roles vary so much, not only between sectors but also between individual pharmacies. What we do know, however, is that we impact positively on patient care whatever we do and wherever we work.

Last year, APTUK worked with the University of East Anglia, who commissioned a piece of research into ‘Identifying the Roles of Pharmacy Technicians in the UK’. This was the first research of its kind and aimed to provide the pharmacy profession with information about the current and future pharmacy technician landscape. It highlighted how pharmacists and pharmacy technicians might work together to take the profession forward for the benefit of patients safely and efficiently. 

The research listed all of the everyday tasks undertaken by the community pharmacy technicians who responded to the survey. You can read the list on page 49 of the report at: aptuk.org/aptuk-news/2016/10/8/identifying-roles-pharmacy-technicians-uk-final-re. It also highlighted the fact that community pharmacy technicians feel they could offer more and would like to increase their role. Here are some of their responses: 

Utilising skills

I have recently been judging a number of awards and know of the remarkable patient-centred work that pharmacy technicians are already carrying out. From this I can see that pharmacy technicians are applying their leadership skills by managing the pharmacy team as well as the day-to-day running of the dispensary, delivering staff training, monitoring staff and pharmacy performance, undertaking stock management and procurement, leading smoking cessation services and performing final accuracy checks, to name but a few of their roles. 

What else do you feel you could do to release pharmacists’ time so that they can focus on more clinical tasks and advanced or enhanced services? What else could be delegated to you? Contact APTUK with your thoughts so that we can continue to build information to provide clarity of pharmacy technician roles.