Background During their residency pharmacy residents may attend a hospital on-call programme to ensure the continuum of care for inpatients. This hazardous activity, especially because of the diversity of services provided, requires adapted training.

Purpose With a goal based on securing the medication process and improving quality in our hospital, our project was to optimise residents’ training for in-house on-call duties to allow them to receive a strong, clear and complete training, including more practical training.

Material and methods We first established a baseline survey of the existing training methods in our university hospital and in the different hospitals of France (September to December 2016), and we identified the pharmacists and students’ needs in our structure (respectively in December 2016 and July 2017). From this assessment and on the basis of the evolving pedagogical methods, we developed a transverse, structured and harmonised training programme. It has been developed in our hospital pharmacy, starting with the most critical sectors since May 2016.

Results Our national survey’s results highlighted the great disparities of training between the establishments and point out the lack of structure, organisation and harmonisation of the training. Some training programmes are only composed of a theoretical (13%) or practical part (6%). An evaluation of knowledge occurs in only 47% of hospitals. All the training occurs at the beginning of each 6 month period and only 6% of the hospitals set up continuous training. The duration of the theoretical (10 to 15 hours) and practical training (5 to 10 hours) seem to be short. Training support is mainly oral explanations: residents have no written trace of trainings except for their own notes. Residents hope the training will be improved.

Our programme is divided into three parts: initial theoretical training, initial practical training and continuous training. Beyond the harmonisation of theoretical training’s support between the pharmacy’s sectors, new tools were introduced such as an in-house on-call duty notebook complementary to training, simulations’ workshops and interactive quizzes.

Conclusion The next steps of our work are the implementation of our programme in each pharmacy’s sector and its assessment. If successful, a possible extension to the other hospitals in our region will be considered.

No conflict of interest