Editorial board editor-in-chief

Pharmacists continuing education
in Poland
According to Polish pharmaceutical law requirements, every 
practicing pharmacist must gain 100 educational credits during 
a 5-year period. The educational credit pool is sub-divided into 
two groups – those with and those without an exam [5]; so called 
hard 
and 
soft
credits. These continuing education credits are 
necessary to extend the professional license for the next period 
[]. Pharmacists need to collect at least 50 
hard
 
credits and 50 
soft
credits during a 5-years long period. The educational process 
remains under the control of accredited Centres of Postgraduated 
Education, working in cooperation with the Local Pharmaceuti-
cal Boards. Every pharmacist has his own “educational card” 
where the points are recorded [5]. The need to participate in the 
accredited educational courses to keep the professional license 
makes life-long learning obligatory for Polish pharmacists.
Unfortunately there are still some gaps in the legal regula-
tions in the current education system regarding utilization of the 
e-learning techniques. This is the basic obstacle for the develop
-
ment of distance learning in Poland. Nevertheless the situation 
has improved recently. Constructing a didactic process with the 
use of Internet potentially requires the competent application 
of both educational regulations and baseline programmes at 
schools [2]. Another barrier is computer literacy. The majority 
of users confess that their computer activity is limited to simple 
applications, frequently created especially for beginners [2], but 
the situation is improving substantially.
e-learning platforms for pharmacists 
continuing education
Nowadays there are three main e-learning platforms for phar-
macists in Poland: farmacja.edu.pl, created by educators from 
the Faculty of Pharmacy Warsaw Medical University, a recently 
established portal e-umed.edu.pl provided by Medical University 
in Łódź and the oldest and, in our opinion, the largest platform 
e-duk@cja, established by the educators from the Faculty of 
Pharmacy Medical College Jagiellonian University in Krakow. The 
irst version of the Internet based learning system for pharmacists 
e-duk@cja was launched in February 2005. At the beginning,