Objectives A National Recruitment Scheme (NRS) for Pharmacy trainees was introduced in England and Wales in 2017, standardising recruitment processes on behalf of employers and with the aim of reducing bias for candidates applying to training posts within the National Health Service (NHS). This research attempted to identify whether the introduction of the NRS had an impact on the recruitment of Black, Asian, or other Minority Ethnic applicants into the most sought-after posts within the Scheme (hospital posts).Methods An observational study was undertaken. Anonymised pharmacist trainee recruitment data between the cohort intakes of 2015-16 and 2020-21 was obtained from the pharmacy regulator the General Pharmaceutical Council and a comparison of proportional representations of ethnicities was undertaken, to ascertain whether a greater proportion of applicants from minority backgrounds attained the most sought-after posts in the NHS after the NRS was introduced. A robust generalised linear model was then used to analyse the data using binomial as the variance function and logit as a link function, where the proportion of hospital recruitment was an outcome with a two-way interaction between intervention and ethnicity after adjusting for overall proportion.Key Findings The statistical analysis of 18 283 pharmacy trainees in total, of whom 4446 were in hospital, shows a significant overall impact of intervention, with a significant positive change in the proportions of Asian-Pakistani applicants (P-value < 0.001) and Black-African applicants (P-value < 0.001) recruited to hospital posts.Conclusions Since the introduction of the NRS there has been a statistically significant impact on the correlation between the overall number of Black, Asian or other Minority Ethnic applicants and their proportion in hospital. That is, not only is the makeup of the hospital cohort increasingly reflecting the diversity of the overall cohort, but also a larger percentage of each ethnic cohort is attaining hospital training places.

In England and Wales, a new National Recruitment Scheme (NRS) for pre-registration pharmacists was introduced in 2017. The NRS replaced the traditional method of employer-led recruitment or the national recruitment system previously limited to some hospital training programmes. NRS uses assessment methodology involving Multiple-Mini Interviews, Situational Judgement Tests and numeracy skills in ranking and appointing candidates to their preferred training providers through a centralised procedure. This commentary will describe the background, assessment methodology, outcomes of preliminary evaluations and priority research areas for the future in the context of the NRS.