Most pharmacist prescribers are active prescribers who perceive better patient management as a key benefit of their prescribing. Doctors who have worked with pharmacist prescribers and patients receiving care provided by a pharmacist prescriber are highly supportive and value their prescribing roles. Key themes generated from qualitative research were expertise in pharmacotherapy,

the quality of medicines related information and benefits for the wider healthcare team. Issues were, however, noted around a potential lack of continued funding and inadequate support networks. While acknowledging issues of recruitment, response and recall biases, positive patient attitudes were also a key finding of very recent survey based research. Attitudes were overwhelmingly positive with the vast majority agreeing/strongly agreeing that they were

totally satisfied with their consultation selleck and confident that their pharmacist prescribed as safely as their General Practitioner. Pharmacist prescribers were considered approachable and thorough, and most would recommend consulting a pharmacist prescriber. A slightly smaller majority would prefer to consult their General Practitioner if they thought their condition was getting worse and a small minority felt that there had been insufficient privacy and time for all their queries to be answered. One key limitation was the lack of engagement of pharmacist prescribers HDAC inhibitor in the research. Research of the awareness, views and attitudes of members of the Scottish general public towards non-medical prescribing found that more

than half of the respondents were aware of non-medical prescribing. A higher proportion was more comfortable with prescribing by pharmacists and nurses than other health professionals. Several issues relating to aspects of clinical governance were highlighted, specifically education of non-medical prescribers and protection of patient data. Evidence Non-specific serine/threonine protein kinase from the medical literature has demonstrated the importance of the consultation on patient outcomes and hence we have also focused in this area. We have developed and validated an assessment tool, based on the ‘Royal College of General Practitioners’ (RCGP) Video Assessment Tool’, for assessment of pharmacist prescribers’ consultation skills. The RCGP tool was modified to the ‘Pharmacist Consultation Assessment Tool’ (PharmaCAT). Competency areas of the RCGP tool were left unchanged but performance criteria for each were modified to reflect pharmacist prescribing. The PharmaCAT has been tested in the pharmacist prescriber setting. The tool had discriminatory power across different domains and inter-rater reliability. The PharmaCAT has potential to be used as a formative and/or summative assessment tool. Further research and developments in this field are being undertaken in collaboration with NHS Education for Scotland; an online version of PharmaCAT is being piloted.