The Attitude of Pharmacy Specialist to the Generic Competencies of the Pharmacy Technician

The health system and labour market changes makes ahuge challenges for pharmacy technition education institution.Investment in transforming and scaling up professional educationis crucial, as education provides the foundation for building acapable health care workforce. Improving workforce performanceproductivity, capability and the ability to adapt to new roles is anon going challenge in the increasingly dynamic environment.For appropriate and timely changes the level of skills, abilitiesand competencies of pharmacy technicians shouild be known andcontinously monitored. The development of generic competencesor transferable skills is the last component for becoming more andmore relevant for preparing students well for their future role insociety in terms of employability and citizenship. Instrumental,interpersonal and systematic competencies (according researchproject „Tuning Educational Structures in Europe“) can represent allgeneral competencies of young professional pharmacy technician.The authors of this study have carried out the research in orderto determine the atitude of pharmacy specialists to the genericcompetencies of graduated pharmacy technicians practising atLithuanian community pharmacies. The metod of questionairewas applied. The scale of four ranges (poor, fair, good andexcellent) was chosen for measuring the need, importance andpractical evaluation of number general competencies. Twogroups of the respondens (pharmacist and pharmacy technicians)were involved. The resuls showed that pharmacy professionalsshare very similar attitude to the basic need and importance of allgeneral (instrumental, interpersonal and systematic) competencies.There were no significant differences among ratings of these twogroups (p >0.05). Overall the ranges of all general competencieswere high (the most common assigned ranges were “good” andhigher). The young graduates’ pharmacy technician seems forthe more experience colleagues to perform higher skills, abilitiesand competencies in instrumental competencies field rather thanthose which require the longer practical experience. Althoughthe extend of general competencies were high but because ofrecent governmental regulation activities the pharmacy specialistdemonstrated uncertainly about the future of the profession.