Jonathan Burton: ‘Our members need to be able to trust us to represent their interests’

Even though he has only just started his current term as chair of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s (RPS) Scottish Pharmacy Board (SPB), Jonathan Burton is a familiar face both in Scotland and beyond. 

This is Burton’s second time in the hot seat, having sat on the SPB between 2012 and 2021, as vice chair from 2017 to 2019 and chair of the board from 2019 to 2021.

In 2018, Burton received an MBE for services to healthcare. He described the commendation as “a genuine surprise”, adding that it felt like “recognition for the amazing contribution that community pharmacists and their teams make to patients in their communities across the country”.

Five years later, Burton received another award — the 2023 RPS Charter medal — for promoting the interests of pharmacy at an outstanding level. Burton had been involved with the early development of Pharmacy First services in Scotland. Not only is the service now nationally commissioned, but it also formed the blueprint on which the Pharmacy First service in England was built. 

Having now regained his position as chair of the SPB following the elections in May 2024, Burton’s dedication to his patients and his pharmacy colleagues is clearly as strong as ever. Speaking to The Pharmaceutical Journal at the end of a busy day working across his Right Medicine Pharmacy Group, which he co-owns, Burton spoke about the upcoming work of the newly-formed SPB and his hopes for his latest tenure as chair.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your current role? 

My working week is split between two pharmacies. As a designated prescribing practitioner (DPP), I assist other pharmacists working towards their independent prescribing qualifications. I run ‘Teach and Treat’ sessions for NHS Education for Scotland — that’s where qualified prescribers who want to do common conditions assessments can spend a little bit of time with me as part of their clinic set-up process. We can see a few patients together and discuss cases, and make sure they get off to the best start possible. 

I also assist Strathclyde School of Pharmacy with some of their independent prescribing course content, mainly introducing the trainee independent prescribers (IPs) to prescribing practice in a community setting and helping with some of the OSCE assessments as well, which I really enjoy. 

Is supporting pharmacists to become independent prescribers something that’s important to you?

Yes. It’s an interesting time at the moment, there are a lot of challenges around the newer cohorts of prescribing-ready pharmacists and how that’s going to look and feel in practice, as well as how those people are going to be supported. In Scotland, we have a lot of community pharmacists coming through the IP courses, so there’s a great need for DPP support. I guess I consider it a professional obligation and I do enjoy it. 

There is a lot of pressure on quite a small number of us to try to facilitate that. We need to get a bit creative about how we do that on a slightly larger scale. I find teaching is quite demanding: I enjoy it, but it takes a lot out of you, especially if you’re teaching in practice. You’ve got the patient and family to think about and you’re also bringing the other pharmacist into that equation and trying to support and teach them.

It’s a skill that has taken me a long time to develop; it takes a lot of practice. We need to think about how we do that better as a profession. 

What kind of breadth of experience is there on the current Scottish Pharmacy Board? 

I have previously served on the SPB and have been fortunate enough to work with a lot of fantastic people — this board is no exception. There’s an amazing breadth of experience and knowledge from primary care, hospital, community, education, specialist services. 

It has been a while since I’ve chaired a meeting; I’ve been out of things for about three years now. But it was an absolute pleasure. One thing that struck me was that everyone around the table was fully engaged: asking challenging questions, able to chip in their knowledge and expertise in all development areas. 

It is up to us now to decide the key issues that we want to discuss on a country level. We need to be aware of what the issues are in Scotland and where we can influence things. At the same time, there’s a lot going on within the RPS and there is a lot that we are going to work on with the other national pharmacy boards on, so I think it’s exciting and it’s going to be a busy couple of years. 

What can you tell us about the pharmacy board’s workplan for 2025?  

We’ve had our first meeting and we’ve had the chance to discuss, in the scheme of things, probably quite a small number of issues. But we’ve already got some action points. Some of them are Scotland-specific issues — for example, around workforce — where we need to dig into that a little bit further. What’s happening in 2026? How are we supporting our new IPs? 

There are also some issues that we’re starting to horizon scan for — things that are going to be coming through Scottish Parliament, where we’re going to be one of the professions contributing towards the debate. Assisted dying and women’s health policies were two of the things that we touched on at the latest meeting and we’ve got various action points about going away and bringing back more detailed information for the board. 

We’re early stage in that but we’re trying to hit the ground running. There are some things where you just need to get a bit more info so you can make a really informed decision as a board. 

Why is the Scottish government’s ‘Women’s health plan‘ important to pharmacy? 

Women’s health is a massive area with lots of subsections. What we’re looking to do, at the very least, is highlight where pharmacists can contribute, but also to guide Scottish government in terms of where our workforce pressures are, and which services fit into which bits of the pharmacy workforce better. 

One of the things we have discussed is the temptation to put every piece of outstanding work in the way of community pharmacies. While it is very good to know that the message is out there that we can deliver good quality primary care services through community pharmacy, we can’t do everything and anything for everyone. There are some things that community pharmacy is eminently the sensible place for people to access services, but there are also other services that are maybe better suited to different work environments. 

As a Society, we represent pharmacists in all different sectors of the profession: we can find out what’s going on in primary care; what our specialists are doing in secondary care and tertiary care and bring all that into the picture. We do this so that the people who are putting together these big policy pieces know exactly how our pharmacists and pharmacy services are set up and where the services are best placed. 

What other RPS Scotland work would you like to highlight?

Assisted dying is a piece of work that’s going to go through Scottish Parliament and how we feed into that is really important. We’ve been doing a lot of work around the conscientious objection element of that, making sure that pharmacists are protected and don’t find themselves in situations where they feel they have to do things that they don’t want to do. 

It’s quite legally complex, so we’re absolutely following every step of that and making sure that we contribute at the right times, in the right way, to make sure that pharmacists can contribute to this in a way which is professionally appropriate. 

Aside from that, we’ve got an eye on workforce and how we organise ourselves and the pressures that prescribing is bringing to the profession. I think that’s one that we’ll have to work on with other partners in Scotland. 

What would you like to achieve by the end of your term as chair of the Scottish Pharmacy Board? 

My barometer would be — and not just as a chair, but as a board member as well — have we made a difference to the practicing lives of pharmacists in Scotland? We can influence that in two ways: through the lobbying that we do in Parliament; and by making sure that the profession’s voice is heard. 

But the other side is how pharmacists engage with the RPS. I would hope that the credentialing programmes that we have in place for Foundation-level pharmacists, advanced practice and consultant-level pharmacists continue to be more embedded in our professional lives.

We recently had our tenth consultant pharmacist credentialed in Scotland, which is an amazing achievement for those individuals and as a profession supporting those individuals. I would like to see lots more pharmacists benefiting from those pathways across the profession. Not just our specialist, hospital and primary care colleagues: it would be fantastic to see community pharmacy colleagues working through the advanced pathway. I truly believe that we should at some point in the future have consultant-level community pharmacists. 

The credentialing thing is so big for us as an organisation and I would like to see that more embedded in practice, I would like to see employers engaging with it more, I would like to see our regulator recognising it formally. 

Do you have any messages to anyone who might want to engage more with the Society?

My door is always open for people to contact me directly or contact the RPS. If members in Scotland have issues that they’re worried about, or they have things that they want us to do more of, or any comments or opinions, those are always welcome.

It’s the role of the board to represent members in Scotland. Not everything will go to a referendum-style consultation, so our members do need to be able to put that trust in us to be sensible; to represent their interests and the interest of patients who use our services. 

I’m very much going to be in listening mode from start to finish here. That’s not just a “first 100 days” type of thing. If people have got an opinion about the Society, or something about the profession that they’re not happy with, then we need to hear it. We will obviously go out and engage as much as we possibly can, but nothing beats people coming to us proactively. I will always listen to what people have to say.