A recent review of the published literature on the assessment of educational needs in primary care physicians identified over 35 such studies. The majority of these concerned the subjective assessment of need based on the perceptions of the learner or teacher and few of the studies used objective measures and self-assessment to gauge level of knowledge or practice. A paucity of studies on assessing educational needs have been carried out in the field of pharmacy and few have evaluated the ability of pharmacists to self-assess their own continuing professional development (CPD) needs. This is important because pharmacists are being actively encouraged to undertake activities to ensure continuing professional development. For the last three years the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain has included a section in its publication "Medicine, ethics and practice" entitled " Good practice for ensuring professional competence". This section reproduces a CPD learning cycle encompassing: assessing need, planning activities, implementing and recording activities and evaluating their usefulness. It is likely that the majority of pharmacists assess their own learning needs and learn on an ad hoc basis based on this self-assessment. This may not be the most appropriate way to ensure professional development since this self-assessment may be invalid and result in inappropriate and ineffective learning experiences.

The aim of this study was to determine the ability of pharmacists to self-assess their clinical knowledge and the subsequent need for tools that objectively assess individual CPD needs. Having excluded retired pharmacists, pharmacists registered as paying the ill-health retention fee and members of academic staff at a local School of Pharmacy, a coded questionnaire (questionnaire 1) was sent to the remaining 300 pharmacists within one RPSGB local branch.

Participants were asked to self-assess their level of knowledge on a 9 point semantic differential scale: large gaps in knowledge to comprehensive knowledge for a range of 18 disease states that pharmacists commonly encounter in primary and secondary care.

Questionnaire 1 was returned by 123 (41%) of the pharmacists. Two of the disease states, namely type-2 diabetes and epilepsy, were selected for follow up with an objective assessment of knowledge. Each disease state was selected because it had a wide spread of responses on the nine point scale and each had a near normal distribution. Objective, true/false type questions were developed and validated for face and content validity using a modified Delphi technique involving a panel of experts including practising pharmacists from academia, primary and secondary care. Twenty-five questions on each topic were included in the final questionnaire (questionnaire 2) that was successfully piloted and then sent to all respondents of the first questionnaire. Questionnaire 2 was returned by 62 (50.4%) of participants and scores on the objective assessment were correlated with the self-assessment of knowledge using the Spearman's rank correlation coefficient. The results show that there was only a weak correlation between pharmacists self-assessment of knowledge and their objective assessment (type-2 diabetes: rs = 0.311, p<0.05 and epilepsy rs = 0.264, p<0.05).

This study has only addressed one area of CPD, namely knowledge, and indicates that that there is a need for self-assessment tools that help the pharmacist to accurately identify individual CPD needs. This may be true for other areas such as application of knowledge and practice based skills including general communication skills and physical assessment skills all of which are important in taking forward pharmaceutical care models and the prescribing vision incorporated in 'Crown' 2.

Further work to overcome methodological issues will be discussed along with required adaptations to the methodology for investigating other areas of CPD beyond knowledge.