Prescription for learning? Meeting the development needs of the pharmacy profession

This article explores the use of open learning to meet pharmacists' continuing development needs in the UK—a topic that the researchers first explored in 1996. First, it sets those needs in the context of the changing role of the pharmacist within the health care team. Second, the authors report the findings from a one-year study conducted in 1999–2000 by the Scottish Council for Research in Education of continuing professional development (CPD) provided by the Centre for Pharmacy Postgraduate Education at the University of Manchester. Data were collected from a 10% sample of registered pharmacists, telephone interviews with some employers and focus group meetings with a sample of pharmacists and tutors. Changes in pharmacists' attitudes to, and uptake of, CPD over the period are highlighted, the most significant of which is the growth in informal learning, an approach that now requires to be incorporated into an integrated model of CPD.