CPPE Helping pharmacy professionals to deliver good SRH Care - by Hayley Berry
Date: 10 Oct 2019
Author: Hayley Berry
Hayley Berry writes about pharmacists and how they can develop knowledge and skills to deliver SRH consultations.
Hayley Berry is a pharmacist and works for the Centre for Pharmacy Postgraduate Education (CPPE). She is also a member of the General Training Committee here at the faculty, where she is keen to raise the profile of pharmacy professionals in sexual healthcare. In this blog, Hayley discusses the training that CPPE provide to support pharmacy professionals to deliver good sexual and reproductive healthcare.
The Centre for Pharmacy Postgraduate Education (CPPE) is funded by Health Education England to provide continuing professional development (CPD) opportunities for all pharmacists and pharmacy technicians providing NHS services in England. Our mission statement is to be the provider of educational solutions for the NHS pharmacy workforce across England to maximise its contribution to improving patient care. CPPE is part of the Division of Pharmacy and Optometry, within the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health at the University of Manchester. Our team of staff are committed to offering continuing professional development opportunities for pharmacy professionals through high-quality services and learning materials. We run a number of events each semester across England. Our training comprises of e-learning programmes, online tutor-led and self-directed courses, downloadable materials, face to face workshops, residential events and conferences. All our learning has an accompanying assessment to affirm the learning of our users. Visit the CPPE website to find out more.
CPPE provide an extensive number of programmes and workshops to support pharmacy professionals in developing the knowledge and skills to help them deliver sexual health consultations. These include Emergency contraception e-learning and workshop, Chlamydia workshop, Sexual health in pharmacies e-learning, Safeguarding for pharmacy professionals and their teams e-learning and workshop, Contraception e-learning, a suite of materials on consultation skills and a programme to support with dealing with difficult discussions related to sexual health consultations. We have recently developed Sexual health and Emergency hormonal contraception gateway pages, which allow easy navigation to our resources and signposting to other organisations and guidance.
We develop our programmes with experts in the topic and have a robust programme development and quality assurance programme with regular updates from experts in the field, so we can assure our learners and other health care professionals that they have the best quality learning materials available to them.
The Declaration of Competence (DoC) system has been developed to support pharmacy professionals in assuring commissioners that they are service-ready and have the appropriate knowledge, skills and behaviours to deliver high-quality, consistent services. The DoC system is supported for use across England by Health Education England (HEE) and endorsed by NHS England and Public Health England. Many commissioners are now including the DoC system in their service specifications, service level agreements and patient group directions. Pharmacy professionals are personally responsible for keeping their knowledge and skills up to date and relevant to their roles and responsibilities. Working through the DoC system supports them with the resources to reflect on their current competences, and identify and meet their learning and assessment needs for each service. Three of the sexual health services which are covered by the DoC system are emergency hormonal contraception, chlamydia testing and treatment and oral contraception; each of these DoCs enables pharmacy professionals to demonstrate to their commissioners that they are competent to deliver the sexual health services commissioned in their areas.