Royal Pharmaceutical Society
The Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) Welsh Pharmacy Board met on 21 February 2025 at the Society’s Cardiff office. On the agenda for the meeting was the facilitated sale of Pharmacy (P) medicines, a review of RPS constitution and governance proposals activity, and business plans for the year ahead.
Apologies were received from board members Gareth Hughes, Rhian Lloyd-Evans and Dylan Jones.
Present at the meeting were Elen Jones, director for Wales and England; Paul Bennett, chief executive of the RPS; Claire Anderson, president of the RPS; Alwyn Fortune, RPS policy and engagement
lead for Wales; Iwan Hughes, RPS Wales head of external affairs; Liz North (via Teams), RPS head of strategic communications, and (via Teams) a member observer.
Facilitated sale of P medicines
Elen Jones, director for Wales at the RPS, noted that a report prepared by the Society’s science and research team, and presented at the previous board meeting, had now been discussed with the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC). She said there had been “positive discussions about how we could work going forward if boards choose to work on additional guidance”.
Jones presented three options to help the board to “decide the way forward”, which were:
- Maintain the policy that has been in place since 1950;
- Change RPS policy and support facilitated sale including endorsement of regulatory guidance; or
- Change RPS policy and allow facilitated sale in certain conditions and with built in safeguards.
The current RPS policy is that P medicines must not be accessible to the public for self-selection. Jones said the GPhC is clear that several guidelines/safeguards must be in place for facilitated sale.
Board member Rafia Jamil raised a question on educating the public about reasons for a refusal of sale. “How do we support pharmacists if they need to refuse a sale?” he asked.
Board member Richard Evans said that for developing additional guidance, “addressing concerns raised by pharmacists is important”.
Jones noted that the majority of pharmacies currently doing facilitated sale are multiples, and “we need to make sure independents can access guidance and support”.
After discussion, a consensus in favour of the third option — change RPS policy and allow facilitated sale in certain conditions and with built in safeguards — was reached by the board.
Inclusion and diversity, engagement and health inequalities
Amandeep Doll, head of professional belonging at the RPS, said that the Society was updating its inclusion and diversity strategy for 2026, because the current document was launched as a five-year strategy for 2020-2025 . She confirmed that there would be a consultation launched in April 2025.
Doll also noted that the Society had been working for the past five years with NHS England as a partner organisation for inclusive pharmacy practice.
In terms of what board members would like to see in a policy, board member Eleri Schiavone highlighted the prison sector. “If you look at evidence, a lot of prisoners are from deprived areas,” she pointed out.
Board members also flagged socioeconomic factors and pharmacy closures, Welsh language provision and digital exclusion.
Pharmacy: delivering a healthier Wales
Anna Croston, project lead for ‘Pharmacy: delivering a healthier Wales’, said that the first quarter of 2025 had been focused on stakeholder engagement. She said there had been three face-to-face events so far this year, with attendees sharing views on how they would like to see the profession evolving over the years. A meeting of the delivery board has also been held.
Croston confirmed that five hospital visits and two community pharmacy visits had taken place so far. In the latter, the team had spoken to a pharmacy technician who has delivered services, including flu vaccination and smoking cessation, and an independent prescriber who spoke about the technology involved in running clinics.
A meeting with a patient organisation was scheduled for 5 March 2025.
Jones said that the next step was to take findings to the Welsh Pharmaceutical Committee. “We will try to distil it into what the goals could look like before consulting on that,” she said.
Constitution and governance update
In an update ahead of the special resolution vote opening on 13 March 2025, chief executive Paul Bennett said that the Society was “keeping an eye on business as usual, in parallel with this significant piece of work”.
Liz North, RPS head of strategic communications at the RPS, told the meeting that the Society was moving into communicating why charter change matters, mobilising the vote and enacting the change.
Asked if there were any concerns about the vote outcome being other than positive, North said the team “had some challenging conversations that have steered thinking, not so much about the proposals but about what the future will look like”.
Bennett said it was important not to take anything for granted, but that the roadshows “demonstrated that those attending were motivated individuals, overwhelmingly positive”.
“There is a lot of work to do so secure what I hope will be a positive response but we can’t take it for granted,” he said.
Business plan
Jones noted that at its previous meeting in November 2024, the board was asked to add weighting to areas that its members expected to work on. There were several areas highlighted, including health inequalities, language barriers and pharmacy closures, palliative care, and women’s health. Jones said the latter was taking a “three nations approach”.
In a summary of the Society’s professional standards workplan for 2025/2026, Regina Ahmed, guidance manager for the RPS professional standards team, said the greener pharmacy toolkit was due to launch in April 2025. She added that the pharmacogenomics framework for all prescribers was in literature review and early draft stage, and that there was funding in principle and scoping being done for a refreshed QA of aseptic pharmacy services.
Ahmed also noted that work on the ‘Designated prescribing practitioner competency framework‘ would be starting shortly and that the team were looking at scoping for an MEP app, but nothing was set in stone yet.
The date of the next Welsh Pharmacy Board meeting was set for 18–19 June 2025.
