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Almost three-quarters (72.9%) of survey respondents were “satisfied or highly satisfied” with the preregistration training programme offers they received through Oriel, according to a study of student experience of the recruitment scheme.
The authors of the study, published in BMC Medical Reports
, said the online survey was circulated to around 2800 pharmacy students in England and Wales, who were asked about the preregistration offers they received in 2017/2018, the year the survey was introduced. The researchers received 327 completed surveys in response.
A high proportion (84.1%) of respondents said they received an offer in the first round of recruitment, although a gender difference was observed: 88% of female applications received an offer in the first round, compared with 76% of male applicants.
All pharmacy hospital preregistration placements are advertised through Oriel, as are some, but not all, community pharmacy placements.
Around half (49.2%) of respondents were “satisfied or highly satisfied” with Oriel’s preferencing process, through which applicants select their preferred options for preregistration training programmes. But the study authors noted that while most (73.6%) applicants felt they had enough time for the preferencing process, just under a fifth (18.1%) said the timeframe was “inadequate”. In 2017, the preferencing window ran from 31 July to 21 August.
The British Pharmaceutical Students’ Association (BPSA) has conducted a survey of students’ experience of Oriel for the 2018/2019 intake. Although the results of this survey have yet to be published, a spokesperson for the BPSA said that around 40% of respondents reported that their experience of the preferencing system was either “good or very good”.
In 2017 a BPSA survey found that just over half (53.2%) of pharmacy students rated the overall experience of Oriel as “poor” or “very poor”.
