Ian Bates receives RPS Charter Award

Ian Bates, professor of pharmacy education at the School of Pharmacy, University College London and education adviser to the English Pharmacy Board, has received the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s (RPS) annual Charter Award.

Paul Bennett, chief executive of the RPS, said Bates had been selected for the honour because of his “immense contribution to the profession over a number of years, particularly in pharmacy education and workforce development at a national and international level”.

Bates, a Fellow of the RPS, is an expert adviser to the Society on education, and helped develop its Foundation and Faculty programmes. He also helped to establish, and now directs, the joint RPS–International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP) Global Pharmacy Workforce Observatory, an online database for global pharmacy workforce intelligence. Bates co-edited Transforming Our Workforce, a 2016 document produced by FIP, which describes tools, mechanisms and polices that can be used by policymakers to develop the global pharmaceutical workforce. Bates also led, with the UCL–FIP Collaborating Centre, the creation of FIP’s 13 Pharmaceutical Workforce Development Goals, launched in November 2016.

With colleagues at the UCL School of Pharmacy, Bates established the Competency Development and Evaluation Group (CoDEG) — a network of pharmacists and researchers which looks at how pharmacy practitioners can maintain their fitness to practise. From CoDEG came the Joint Programmes Board, a collaboration between schools of pharmacy and the NHS to ensure that the post-registration training of pharmacists meets NHS fitness to practise requirements.

The Charter Award is the second recognition in as many months for Bates — in September 2017, at the RPS annual conference, he was presented with the RPS Leadership in Pharmacy award.