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disseminates evidence-based guidance, consensus-based standards, tools and resources for educational development and quality assurance, as well as developing and facilitating education-related policy that supports advancement of the profession. This is aided by working closely with stakeholders at global, regional and local levels.

Building on the success of the 2008-2010 Action Plan [1]

implemented by the PET, the current domains of activity will continue to develop and grow in a sustainable way.

The current Work Plan is oriented towards identifying locally determined needs and services and using those to facilitate comprehensive education development and achievement of competencies, which are required to deliver the services (Figure 5.1). The domains for action prioritised in the current Work Plan relate specifically to developing a pharmacy education vision and framework, preparing the pharmacy workforce, quality assurance of education, and developing educational leadership. From these domains, nine project teams have been created to support the areas of:

Academic Capacity Competency Continuing Professional Development/Continuing Education Interprofessiona Education Leadership Pharmacy Support Workforce Quality Assurance Social Accountability Workforce The leadership for these project teams comes from the EDT, which serves as the coordination, analysis and dissemination hub. It includes both a core of key stakeholders and a dynamic shell of collaborators most attuned to the needs of their regions. The global workforce needs to be competent, capable and flexible with a clear orientation to a medicines-centred, patient-focused approach towards education, development and professional practice, centred on the tenets of needs- based education. FIPEd and EDT advocate for professional needs-based education, working in partnership with UNESCO and WHO [2-7].

For healthcare professionals, the capability to improve therapeutic outcomes, patients quality of life, scientific advancement and public health imperatives is dependent on a foundation of education and training. Likewise, a capable practitioner workforce is an essential pre-requisite for all healthcare professions and pharmacy is no exception. Evolving roles towards more patient-facing service provision has been a steady trend in the last two decades and modern, contemporary forms of initial education and training are vital for professions to be able to meet the increasingly complex healthcare demands of populations [3-7].

Pharmacy education worldwide continues to have many issues that challenge the quality of teaching and learning at a time when there are limited resources to meet these challenges. The data from the 2012 FIP Global Pharmacy Workforce report makes clear that there is a global scarcity of qualified pharmacists to provide patient care, even though there are more opportunities for pharmacists to expand their roles and responsibilities [8].

FIPEd and its groups have been highly active with projects and publications across the domains of human resources, quality assurance, social accountability, competency, leadership and the pharmacy support workforce, such as:

2012 Global Pharmacy Workforce Report (www.fip.org/ humanresources) Published and launched at the FIP Centennial Congress, the report includes data from 90 countries and territories and nine country case studies, as well as an important chapter developed with their partner WHO, on transforming and scaling up education.

Global Competency Framework Recognition (www.fip.org/ pe_resources) Version 1 of the GbCF developed by the FIP Pharmacy Education Taskforce, to support the educational development of pharmacy practitioners, has been recognised and utilised by national associations in several countries and in regional initiatives to date.

FIP-UNESCO UNITWIN: Global Pharmacy Education Development network (GPhED) Two Platform Projects Launched (www.fip.org/pe_resources) SABER and Pharmapedia. SABER is an open access platform designed for provider institutions to share and develop learning and simulation tools, being hosted by Monash University in cooperation with UNITWIN partners. Pharmapedia is directed towards individuals (students and practitioners) and is a content-driven wiki® platform intended for long-term growth as a knowledge resource for pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences. Academic Institutional Membership (AIM) (http://aim.fip.org) Over 100 AIM members in 2012 and growing. AIM continues to grow as a distinctive FIP membership category that allows faculties and schools of pharmacy to become inter-connected on a global platform of discussion, leadership and shared challenges and successes. AIM focuses on the advancement of Faculties and Schools of Pharmacy fostered by faculty Deans and decision makers alongside the on-going changes in pharmacy practice, science, research and their respective funding. The Academic Institutions are represented by their Deans, Vice Deans, and other decision makers within the membership activities such as an online discussion/exchange/ news platform and the annual Global Deans Forum at the FIP Congress.

2012 AIM Global Deans Forum (http://aim.fip.org) - Over 70 AIM members participated in the Global Dean s Forum in Amsterdam. Expert speakers and facilitators from around the