An Initiative to Ensure Profession Preparedness

Introduction: In Australia, pharmacists have been traditionally involved with vaccine education, advocacy and distribution. An emerging role for pharmacists is the administration of vaccines. As the role of the pharmacist evolves in Australia it is imperative that undergraduate curricula evolve simultaneously to ensure graduate preparedness.

Description: The Pharmacy Board of Australia and the Australian Pharmacy Council have stated that administering vaccines is within an Australian pharmacist’s scope of practice. Jurisdictional regulation is changing enabling pharmacist administered vaccinations. It is both timely and essential that a specifically tailored national undergraduate pharmacy vaccination training program and competency is developed and validated, with reference to existing national and international programs, feedback provided by other health disciplines and guidelines that have been published for the profession.

Evaulation: An undergraduate training program needs to be designed after extensive perusal of all current Australian and international immunisation/vaccination/injection training programs for health professions. Additionally the delivery of the training program itself needs to be evaluated by academic staff, other than the developer, and by students.

Future Plans/Work/ Implementation: The Australian undergraduate pharmacists’ program for injections skills training and vaccination training which have been developed and validated by established pharmacist vaccinators and academics nationally and internationally may be adopted by pharmacy schools in Australia and overseas. It is intended that the developed and validated training program will be delivered to pharmacy students in 2015 academic year.