“Protected learning time is essential for pharmacists to keep their skills up to date and deliver the best care for patients,” says Claire Anderson, president of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS).
“It should be consistently built into job plans so that all pharmacists can develop their knowledge, support colleagues and improve services.”
However, NHS trusts and health boards are falling short on providing job plans for hospital pharmacists, meaning many do not have any protected learning time to develop their skills and undertake additional training.
In response to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request from The Pharmaceutical Journal, designed in collaboration with the Guild of Healthcare Pharmacists (GHP) and sent to all NHS trusts and health boards in Great Britain, data provided by 201 respondents have revealed that more than one-quarter (28%; n=57/201) of trusts and boards do not offer formalised protected learning time in job plans (see Figure 1).
Paul Day, director of membership and communities at the Pharmacists’ Defence Association (PDA), says these data are “disappointing”.
All employers, not just those in the NHS, should be providing protected paid learning time to any pharmacists they employ
Paul Day, director of membership and communities at the Pharmacists’ Defence Association
“All employers, not just those in the NHS, should be providing protected paid learning time to any pharmacists they employ.”
Protected learning time is something the RPS has long campaigned for. In 2020, as part of its ‘Workforce wellbeing’ campaign, the Society called for all pharmacists to have access to protected learning time to develop clinical and non-clinical skills, particularly around education, research and leadership.
In February 2025, the GHP launched a campaign calling for NHS pharmacists to have a mandated minimum of 10% of their contracted hours protected for supporting professional activities (otherwise known as protected learning time) embedded in their job plans.
“This [10%] is to reflect the increase in professional responsibilities, such as supervising junior colleagues with their prescribing, supporting undergraduate students, postgraduate education requirements, portfolio development, professional credentialing and much more,” the GHP said at the time.
Consistency is crucial
Job plans involve allocating a proportion of time a pharmacist will spend on clinical care and other supporting clinical activities within their role.
In guidance published in 2023, NHS England described these plans as “integral to service recovery and staff wellbeing”.
However, data provided in response to The Pharmaceutical Journal’s FOI request show that 23% of NHS trusts (n=46/201) use job plans. Of these trusts and health boards, 8% (n=4/46) use job plans for all pharmacists they employ (see Figure 2).
Poureya Aghakhani, deputy chief pharmacist (transformation and medicines optimisation) at Northwick Park Hospital, London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust, says these data are “unsurprising”.
“I just don’t think job plans in pharmacy are particularly common still and it makes sense in that we haven’t really structured ourselves around that.”
“It’s very difficult, especially at a rotational and clinical job, to section off your day so neatly. It just doesn’t work for us,” he explains.
However, the London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust, for which Aghakhani works, has started to implement job plans, primarily for senior roles.
He explains that this is because these roles tend to be “more consistent”.
“You spend a lot more time on things like governance, education, training, leadership, business planning strategy, ward cover, clinical [activities] etc, so you can chunk time a little bit more.”
He adds that the trust has also implemented plans for some non-rotational roles, such as band 7 pharmacists working in acute medicine, owing to more consistency in these roles.
“You have, say, 80% ward time, and then maybe a day a week or so off [the wards] — and then it’s [planning] what that time off looks like.”
Junior pharmacists hit harder
The trend of more senior pharmacists having job plans is reflected in the FOI data from NHS trusts and health boards.
In their FOI responses, 13% of trusts and health boards (n=6/46) explicitly mentioned that job planning is employed for consultant pharmacists only, while one trust states only for “a select few advanced clinical pharmacists”.
In its FOI response, Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust said that job planning “is something that we are working towards with all pharmacists; all [band] 8as and above have undertaken job planning and this will next be undertaken with the band 6 and 7 pharmacists”.
A spokesperson for the GHP, who has seen The Pharmaceutical Journal’s full FOI data, acknowledges this trend.
Despite describing the trusts and boards that employ job planning as “trailblazing”, they note that job planning is generally only employed for more senior or consultant pharmacists.
However, “job planning allows for more than allocation of protected time”.
“It allows for greater workforce insights and granular data on capacity in pharmacy services. Whole-time equivalent headcounts can be useful, but leaders in hospital pharmacies need to think about pharmacist resource that can be dedicated for each aspect of service delivery,” the spokesperson adds.
Andrew Walker, an oncology pharmacist at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, agrees that job plans can provide this level of detail and that this is useful for pharmacy leaders.
“What I think a job plan does well is that it encourages people who are in more senior leadership positions to reflect on the diversity of work that we’re asking people to undertake, and to really consider things that are not direct patient-facing activities or direct service provision, such as training, education and research, because when you are producing rotas again, you’re looking at them from a very different approach,” he explains.
However, Walker also flags that job plans also have the potential to be detrimental through preventing junior pharmacists from having the chance to develop their planning and time-management skills.
“If you had a very prescriptive job plan, which was removing an element of flexibility, then that may also be a challenge to provision of service and also maybe to the detriment of some of my junior colleagues who wouldn’t necessarily have the opportunity to decide where they want to allocate their time.”
Workforce crisis
Joseph Williams, education and training lead pharmacist at the Christie NHS Foundation Trust and chair of the British Oncology Pharmacy Association, highlights the NHS workforce crisis as a reason for the lack of protected learning time in trusts and health boards.
Clinical service and firefighting is always coming first, which leads to a burnt out and an unmotivated profession
Joseph Williams, education and training lead pharmacist at the Christie NHS Foundation Trust and chair of the British Oncology Pharmacy Association
Even if job plans include protected learning time, “I think clinical service and firefighting is always coming first, which leads to a burnt out and an unmotivated profession”, he says.
“That just leads to people leaving the trust because they don’t have any succession plans or they don’t have any plans post their development review to say, ‘I want to do this this year’. There isn’t the support necessarily in place to allow staff to achieve their goals.”
Of 577 respondents to a question on access to professional support in The Pharmaceutical Journal’s 2025 job satisfaction and salary survey of UK pharmacists — conducted in May 2025 — just over one-quarter (27%) said they had accessed protected learning time over the past year.
Broken down by sector, hospital pharmacists had joint lowest access to protected learning time with pharmacists in academia and pharmacists working in the pharmaceutical industry, with 20% of respondents from each of these sectors saying they had accessed protected learning time in the past year (n=38/188; n=5/25 and n=4/20, respectively).
This is compared with 31% of community pharmacist respondents (n=34/111), who said they had access to protected learning time, and 56% of GP/primary care network pharmacists (n=48/86).
In their free-text survey responses about what causes stress at work, hospital pharmacists referenced a “lack of job planning and protected personal development time”; “lack of time to do anything other than the prescriptions in front of me”; “relentless workload”; “lack of development opportunities”; and “more responsibility due to no backfill, no time to complete extra roles and continue with my own work (development, quality, training provision to juniors)”.
Walker recognises the impact of NHS workforce pressures in hospitals.
“The sheer amount of work that we all have to do and the challenges that we’re faced with has become appreciably more significant over the 15 years I’ve been in practice,” he says.
“It feels like, since austerity, we have never really recovered our workforce numbers. And the sad reality of that is that when you are faced with the multiple competing challenges, which are service provision, direct patient care, etc., one of the things that goes in that equation is the training and education element, or at least the time for dedicated training and education.
“There’s still a good will to do it, and you’re certainly directed to a number of opportunities which exist, but those opportunities are almost exclusively outside of your working time within the NHS,” he adds.
Taking work home
Diana Matthews, advanced oncology pharmacist and non-medical prescriber in urology at Velindre Cancer Centre at Velindre University NHS Trust in Cardiff, describes herself as a “prime example” of this.
I still haven’t managed to finish my portfolio because you don’t have time aside to do your research. You don’t have time aside to do your development
Diana Matthews, advanced oncology pharmacist and non-medical prescriber in urology at Velindre Cancer Centre at Velindre University NHS Trust in Cardiff
“I started doing my consultant portfolio — I have no protected time for it. I got a consultant pharmacist post, but I still haven’t managed to finish my portfolio because you don’t have time aside to do your research. You don’t have time aside to do your development.”
A consultant pharmacist portfolio is a record showcasing a pharmacist’s expertise across four pillars of advanced practice: clinical practice, leadership and management, education, and research.
Matthews says she struggles to find the time outside of work to complete her portfolio because she is already working more than her hours “every single day”.
“And then I don’t have time to do my portfolio because I also have two small kids,” she adds.
A rotational pharmacist, who has chosen to remain anonymous, says that she must complete work on her postgraduate diploma in advanced pharmacy practice at home.
She acknowledges that while she gets study leave to attend lectures for the course, she would like designated protected learning time as “we’re expected to do everything else at home”.
The pharmacist notes that “it doesn’t increase my stress – it’s just something where you have to go home and you have to think about it. But at the same time, [the Trust] did prepare us, saying we have to do all of this outside of our working hours, which wasn’t ideal, and it wasn’t something that we were expecting to do, but it’s something that we had to adjust to do.
On the workforce crisis, Matthews says: “We need to stop complaining about not having enough staff because we know that’s how it is — it’s not going to change.”
She says that, instead, pharmacy must use the resources it has more effectively, to free up pharmacists’ time for development.
“We have pharmacy technicians that should now be stepping up to free pharmacists from basic processes that we still cover, so that we can then move along a little bit into a more clinical role or management role, for example. At least that would give the time set aside to do that.”
As registered healthcare professionals, the role of pharmacy technicians is expanding to enable them to take on more responsibilities within their capabilities.
For example, draft legislation, set to come into effect by the end of 2025, will enable pharmacy technicians to supervise the preparation, assembly and dispensing of medicines in hospital aseptic facilities.
Integrating learning with the day job
Of the 46 trusts and health boards that said they use job plans in response to The Pharmaceutical Journal’s FOI request, 33 (72%) said they include protected learning time in this (see Figure 3).
The time offered varies, ranging from 30 minutes per week to 20% of a pharmacist’s contracted hours.
Williams advocates for the upper limit suggested by the data. “Ideally you could have 20% of your week [protected] to help with CPD, education, research, catching up — that time to breathe and have a think about what you want to do.”
Protected learning time is cheap training — it doesn’t tend to stick
Poureya Aghakhani, deputy chief pharmacist (transformation and medicines optimisation) at Northwick Park Hospital, London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust
Aghakhani says there is a better option than offering protected learning time — integrate learning into everyday practice, rather than sectioning it off.
“I think protected learning time is cheap training — it doesn’t tend to stick,” he says.
“The only way to make it really apply to a patient is to learn on a real patient,” he explains, giving an example of a case where a pharmacist may see a patient and be unfamiliar with their conditions and potential drug interactions.
“You have to do a lot of digging, you may have to go into primary literature, you find a couple of case reports, you piece them together, you make a recommendation.”
“You learn, you improve and you’re hopefully providing better patient care at the same time — you don’t get that with protected time.”
Matthews also says that protected time can be integrated into the day job. “I think that protected time can be the time you go with someone to a clinic to shadow — it doesn’t mean you go home. By protected time, it just means that you’re off the rota and using that time to progress and to develop.
“I have a band 7 pharmacist that has started working with me in neurology and some of the things that I do, I pass to her to pick up so she learns. For example, she’s developing testicular protocols and reviewing them, and she has time off to do that. That’s her development, but at the same time, it does help the trust.”
What’s the solution?
Whichever way you look at it, it seems a common theme that pharmacists want protected learning time, and senior pharmacists believe they should have it.
Matthews highlights that this is particularly important as more pharmacists begin to qualify as non-medical prescribers (NMPs); for example, from 2026, all pharmacists will qualify as independent prescribers.
She says that without adequate time to learn, “my fear with the pharmacists coming out as NMPs is that they’re going to be put in situations that they might not be comfortable with”.
“That’s up to the employer, to us, to make sure that doesn’t happen in our workplace.”
For the PDA, it’s non-negotiable. “We would expect any organisation that is serious about respectfully employing any sort of professional to provide such [professional development] support to those individuals,” says Day.
“Those that don’t are giving a poor message to the professionals that they employ now and to those whom they would hope to recruit in future. In the longer term, it is a decision which may well have negative impact for that organisation, and if they have difficulty recruiting and retaining professionals in future, they would do well to reflect on how they treated them.”
