Following a public consultation, the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) has revised our standards for prescribing.
Update: The revised standards came into effect on 1 September 2019.
What we are doing
On Wednesday 20 March 2019, our Council decided to:
- change our requirements to ensure practice supervisors are prescribers who are appropriately qualified and experienced to supervise learners, rather than a ‘Designated Medical Practitioner’;
- ensure individuals who complete programmes meet the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s Prescribing Competency Framework, rather than a separate set of HCPC competency standards; and
- include several new standards so the prescribing standards are more closely aligned with the standards of education and training (SETs). These new standards relate to learner involvement, supporting learners to raise concerns about the safety and wellbeing of service users, and ensuring those who complete programmes meet the expectations of professional behaviour in prescribing practice.
Implementing changes
We are satisfied programmes will continue to meet most of the standards based on the revisions we have made. Education providers should use the remainder of this academic year to plan and implement any changes needed to align their programmes to our revised standards – for example, updating requirements to appoint suitable non-medical prescriber supervisors to support programmes’ delivery.
How we will assess programmes
We will assess whether programmes meet our revised standards via our normal annual monitoring process from the 2019-20 academic year.
We will communicate our specific requirements of education providers in our annual monitoring correspondence, which we usually send in August.
Further guidance
We have provided guidance on new SETs that are equivalent to the new prescribing standards. You can use this guidance when considering how to integrate the new standards into your programme.
Professional bodies have produced guidance relating to prescribing entitlements and their profession: