You have missed out an additional guideline given in the footnote of Table 3, i.e. "No points are awarded for events of less than one-hour duration." Thus short articles that take less then one hour to read will get no points. Long articles that take more than one hour to read will get one point and no more. It is not realistic for the Council to give points for every article that a pharmacist read. Spending more than an hour reading an article or chapter will do no harm to anyone eager to improve himself.

Pharmaceutical chemistry and other pharmaceutical sciences are covered in Table 1 under competency D, viz "i. Nature of medicinal products/raw materials". Thus pharmaceutics, pharmaceutical chemistry and pharmacology are the study of the physical, chemical and biological nature of medicinal products/raw materials respectively. In addition, matters relating to laboratory and clinical research are further covered under competency G.

Beside the points given in the answer to Q1, these books and journals must cover areas related to competencies A, B, and C of Table 1. As a general guide, the Council would accept any recommended book or journal in these areas if its title also appeared in the medical library catalogue of NUS. The medical library catalogue is accessible through the website of NUS (i.e. http://www.nus.edu.sg).

The Council has recently increased to cap the category 1A activity from 10 to 15. In addition, you may write to the Council to upgrade the event to 1C on a case-by-case basis. These events must be open to all healthcare professionals in the region, as opposed to personal invitations.

When the Council agreed to accept the same CPE points assigned to programmes accredited by the agencies listed in Table 2 of the Guide, it did so on the premise that the CPE points so awarded have been based on the common practice of awarding 1 CPE point for each contact hour of CPE activity. This has been found to be true in most cases except the credit points awarded by the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE) of the USA. The ACPE uses the continuing education unit (CEU) as the quantitative measurement of CPE activity. Each CEU is defined as 10 contact hours of continuing pharmacy education activity. To avoid any confusion, most CPE providers do give the contact hours of their programme.

Only books and journals related to pharmacy, whose titles appear in the library catalogue of tertiary institutions would be accepted for non-pharmaceutical care points. This follows the same logic that the participants of any CPE event (e.g. talks, conferences etc) must be professional people, scientists, or tertiary students of these disciplines. Talks that are pitched at the general public level do not count for CPE. So are books written for the general public.

Under the definition of CPE (see Q1 of the Guide) the list of recognised CPE programmes do not include meetings. The key point in the definition is that CPE programmes are planned and structured learning events. Meeting by its very nature cannot be planned and structured. If they were, they would have been stage-managed. If meetings were CPE events, most pharmacists would have little difficulty in meeting their CPE target.

You are quite right that meetings do improve one's competency in a certain area. They are part of one's continuing professional development (CPD) on the job. The pro tem CPE committee did in fact consider at length the merit of CPE versus CPD and concluded that we were not yet ready to operate a compliance system that is based on CPD.