Closing the day – Future opportunities for pharmacy

Future opportunities for pharmacy

With Vanessa Burgess (ICB Chief Pharmacist, NHS South East London ICB) and Uzo Ibechukwu (Director of Pharmacy & Medicines Optimisation, Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS FT).

Never waste a crises and make the most out of opportunities that arise from what may appear to be system disruption and challenge.

This was the initial proposition in this interactive and audience-led session, closing what has been a superb and engaging day with PM Healthcare at the RCGPs in London.

The following open questions were put to the audience, leading to a lively and shared-experience discussion:

• When you think about the future of pharmacy, what one word comes to mind?
• What is one role pharmacy should be leading on that it is not currently owning.
• What is something that pharmacy needs to stop doing?
• What’s the barrier that pharmacy needs to unlock – culture, structure, behaviour?
• What will you take back to your organisation to help shape the future of pharmacy?

Audience commentary and panel responses included:

• Enable and prevent – link prevention to activity and make medicines the heart of prevention in a community setting.
• As pharmacy expands its role it must not lose sight of what it is good at – it must build on what it already does well in order to build its future.
• We need to take a multi-disciplinary approach to tackling the challenge of anti-microbial resistance. Multi-sector collaboration may provide the way forward.
• We should stop endlessly ‘doing medicines’ and embrace the opportunities presented by AI and technology to automate and streamline processes.
• The current model of hospital pharmacy will not exist in 15 years.
• Stop accuracy checking where not entirely necessary – challenge processes that we have always done. Question why.
• Be properly prepared for graduate prescribers – embrace the change.
• Stop being pharmacists – meaning to step away from tradition and from what the profession is ‘expected to do’ – embrace change and fluidity!

The overall momentum of the discussion was towards a profession that will be reinvented (and reinvents itself) to meet and contribute to the challenges of system reform, patient needs and game-changing new technologies.

The future of pharmacy is not what it used to be…

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