Learning and CPD: 2024 in review

One of our primary aims at The Pharmaceutical Journal is to provide pharmacists working in all sectors and levels of practice with access to high-quality educational resources that respond to the changing nature of healthcare and the evolving learning needs of the profession. The pace of change has been dramatic, with pharmacists now being called on to develop new skills and assume greater levels of clinical responsibility. This change has been reflected in the CPD and learning content produced by the journal in 2024 with close to 100 new or updated CPD and learning articles published this year. 

At a glance, our list of most-read learning articles from 2024 shows the wide range and diverse nature of the profession in terms of sector, pharmacy knowledge and skills:

Pharmacist prescribing

As the profession responds to the changing nature of the pharmacist’s role, supporting aspiring and current independent prescribers has continued to be a focus. At the start of the year, we launched a dedicated prescribing collection — a set of learning resources mapped to the RPS ‘Competency framework for all prescribers‘, to provide comprehensive coverage of core prescribing knowledge and consultation skills, fully contextualised to pharmacist prescribing.

The collection has grown quickly with new content being frequently added throughout the year. We have also recently expanded the collection with a new ‘Prescribing dilemmas’ article format, where readers are given the chance to learn from the reflections of pharmacist prescribers as they walk through challenging case studies and share their clinical reasoning and approach to decision-making (see Box to find out more).

We will continue to develop new content and resources to meet the emerging needs of pharmacist prescribers and those of designated prescribing practitioners in 2025.

Getting the most from The Pharmaceutical Journal platform

With new resources being continuously added, we have needed to find new ways to present our content to readers, which has involved the creation of dedicated hub pages for our library of clinical conditions. These are curated by the learning team and organised under easy-to-navigate headings and sub-pages. 

The Pharmaceutical Journal

New and updated collections are released each month and featured within our regular learning newsletters. If you would like to stay informed, make sure you are signed up to receive these newsletters by logging into your account and visiting the preference centre.

We have also re-organised our professional skills content, ensuring that everything is mapped to the main RPS curriculum frameworks to ensure they are fully aligned with pharmacist credentialling. These resources are available via our ‘Professional skills’ hub page.

During 2024, we have added to our dedicated resources for students and foundation trainees, including a revision series to support those preparing to sit the General Pharmaceutical Council registration assessment, with worked examples demonstrating a wide range of pharmacy calculations. 

Further development of digital resources

We have continued to look for new ways of developing materials that utilise the full benefits of online learning. We frequently incorporate self-assessment questions in articles to help readers consolidate learning; have created interactive graphics to bring visual subjects to life; and now publish a monthly learning quiz on a different clinical area to allow readers to audit their level of knowledge on different areas of practice. We have some exciting new resources in development that we are looking forward to releasing in coming weeks and months including an interactive consultation. 

Finally, we wanted to take this opportunity to thank our team of nearly 200 authors and peer reviewers who share their knowledge, experience and time enabling us to continue to produce expert-led, high-quality, learning resources. It has been great to be able to work with each and every one of you and we hope to continue to do so in 2025.

And, for those of you who may be interested in writing learning content but are perhaps not sure how to get started, please do get in contact with a member of The Pharmaceutical Journal‘s research and learning team, and we would be happy to discuss your ideas and support you in taking that first step.