Hosting Pharmacy Student Placements in Primary Care: My Experience
Earlier this year, I was approached by the University of Nottingham with a request that many primary care organisations may recognise: could I support pharmacy students to gain placement experience in primary care?
Student access to primary care placements is currently limited. A range of barriers are cited including funding, capacity, supervision concerns, lack of clarity around competence, and uncertainty about the value such placements might bring to already stretched teams. Rather than seeing this as an obstacle at the time, I saw it as an opportunity to pilot something different.
Designing a placement with purpose
After exploring several ideas with the university, I offered to host two pharmacy students for a two-week placement. The aim was twofold:
• To audit our practices’, repeat prescribing processes against the RPS Repeat Prescribing Toolkit
• To support the personalised care team at primary cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention events
This allowed the placement to be both educational for the students and genuinely useful to our federation.
Setting the students up for success
The students joined us for two weeks. A clear induction and plan were put in place at the outset, including agreed objectives, access arrangements, and contact details for the wider team. Importantly, although I remained accountable for the placement, the students were not directly supervised by me at all times.
This encouraged independence while ensuring they knew where to seek support when needed. Rather than following a pre-defined template, the students were given a problem to explore and the autonomy to design how they approached it.
What did the students do?
The students developed their own structured plan, which included:
• Shadowing members of the multidisciplinary team involved in the repeat prescribing process
• Interviewing patients about their experiences of repeat prescriptions
• Auditing prescription workflows on SystmOne
• Speaking with community pharmacists to understand cross-sector perspectives
This approach gave them a whole-system view of repeat prescribing, rather than a single-role or task-based experience.
Reflections on the experience
From my perspective, I was genuinely impressed by how the students used their initiative and adapted to the task in hand. With no existing template or predefined audit standards, they demonstrated flexibility and professionalism. They engaged confidently with clinicians, non-clinical staff, and patients, and added momentum rather than workload.
From the students’ perspective, the placement was described as a valuable learning experience. It gave them a broader understanding of how patients perceive healthcare, how primary care operates day to day, and how different sectors interlink across the prescribing pathway. This insight is difficult to gain in traditional classroom or hospital-based learning alone.
For the GP practices and federation, the placement delivered tangible benefits. The students identified useful insights into how our repeat prescribing systems work in practice, where inefficiencies exist, and what changes could improve both patient experience and system flow. This learning is now being fed into our wider transformation programme.
Why primary care should consider hosting students
This experience challenged some common assumptions about student placements. With clear objectives, light-touch supervision, and a focus on real organisational priorities, hosting pharmacy students can:
• Add capacity and fresh perspective
• Support quality improvement and transformation work
• Strengthen links between education, primary care, and community pharmacy
• Help shape a future workforce that understands primary care realities
For both clinical and non-clinical teams, this was not ‘just a placement’ - it was a mutually beneficial collaboration.
Final thoughts
Primary care has a vital role to play in training the next generation of pharmacists. My experience shows that, with the right planning and mindset, student placements can deliver real value while inspiring students to see primary care as a dynamic and rewarding place to work.
If you are considering hosting pharmacy students but are unsure where to start, I would strongly encourage you to explore it. You may be surprised by how much you and your organisation can gain in return.
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