For many years it has been an advocacy aim of the EAHP to improve the harmonisation and recognition arrangements of hospital pharmacy specialisation across Europe. The purpose behind the aim is to help ensure that patient care and treatment from hospital pharmacy is delivered to common high standards of safety and efficacy, that increasing value be delivered by the hospital pharmacist in patient treatment and that the ever more demanding and complex requirements of medicines use in hospital settings continue to be met.

As stated in the EAHP's most recent 2011 policy on specialisation, the basic education of 5 years for pharmacists as set out in the European Directive on Mutual Recognition of Professional Qualifications 2005/36/EC does not actually provide an individual with sufficient competencies to work independently in the hospital pharmacy environment. Additional competencies are necessary to fully understand the processes in hospitals and to manage the specific requirements of certain patient groups that do not otherwise frequently present in other fields of pharmacy—for example, in paediatric, …