Skills boost for North West England biopharmaceutical industry

18 November 2009

A cutting-edge biopharmaceutical course programme which is set to address a skills shortage has been launched in northwest England.

Partnership for Learning (PFL) based in Speke near Liverpool, is offering a series of bespoke e-learning courses that are the first of their kind in the North West for biopharmaceutical and medical device companies.

The courses, which are delivered via the internet using an e-learning model, were developed by Kaplan Eduneering to meet the regulatory compliance needs of the biomedicall industry. A major study carried out in Merseyside in 2005 identified a number of skills shortages, that can be addressed by targeted e-learning.

Topics on the programme, which is called Bio-med online, can take learners through batch records, GMP principles, IT validation, packaging, production, quality assurance, quality control and warehousing, and is fully compliant with MHRA and FDA requirements.

Ed O’Brien, Chief Executive at PFL, said: “Companies that make a commitment to their staff through skills training are going to be in a much better position to take advantage of the upturn in the economy over the next few months.

“The programme can be accessed at work or even from home — the flexibility means that skills training is even easier for employers to take advantage of.

“It may be that a company has new starters who need the extra help to develop, or even new teams or projects which might require a slightly different skills set to the one they had previously been working with — whatever the reason, new skills are always a benefit to both staff and the company itself.”

The North West England is one of the UK’s top locations for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. With over 200 biomedical companies and over 20,000 staff, it exports £3.4 billion of pharmaceutical products every year.