PJ, April 2022, Vol 308, No 7960

Community pharmacy as a healthcare setting and RPS membership

What efforts would candidates expect the RPS to take to ensure community pharmacies are treated as healthcare settings? Community pharmacies ARE healthcare settings, as evidenced by the Healthy Living Pharmacies requirement of PQS, supported by Healthy Living Champions. Likewise, providing influe…

My vision for pharmacy

Pharmacy is my profession, my passion and my purpose. I want our profession to have the rightful recognition and valuation it deserves, fully integrated into the healthcare team. I’d like to share my views on some challenging issues. What’s my vision for pharmacy? ‘Wherever there is a…

Championing community pharmacists faced with workplace challenges and education inequalities

In community pharmacies, electronic prescribing appeared to be the panacea for managing workload, but this has impacted most of the community pharmacies negatively. Electronic prescriptions printed in their hundreds, in no apparent order apart from being alphabetical. An initial scan helps to outlin…

Patient safety body investigates role of liquid morphine classification following patient death

The Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch investigated whether the classification of oral morphine solution as a Schedule 5 controlled drug could have contributed to a patient's death but found this was not relevant to the case.…

Advocating for pharmacists’ safety and working conditions

The COVID-19 pandemic has given us all the benefits of collaboration in the healthcare industry — working together with the community and other organisations, thus making pharmacy a priority within healthcare settings. The GP surgeries have a reduced service, thus making pharmacy pick up some a…

Medicines and pharmacy of the future

Our roles as experts in pharmacy are to ensure we have the right information and well trained staff and well equipped pharmacies to support our patients and ensure the care we provide is of standard. Pharmacies across all sectors, GP practices, NHS trusts, community pharmacists and others will ne…

Why the RPS needs to rejoin the International Pharmaceutical Federation

Having been an individual member of the International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP) since 2016, I value the global impact on pharmacy an international organisation such as FIP can have. Hence, it is important the RPS seeks to rejoin FIP as soon as practicable as the RPS vision is to become the wor…

There are reasons to be optimistic about integrated care systems

As integrated care systems (ICSs) form, there's an opportunity for a reset in how pharmacy is seen by the rest of the system. However, we all know the current system is close to breaking. That may seem bleak, but there are opportunities: System pressures: getting access to funding for things that…

How the RPS can improve sustainability

Climate change, sustainability, global warming, climate emergency and recycling are all words we have seen recently. What is clear however, is that there is a climate emergency and pharmacy has to play its part in helping achieve the United Nations target of a 1.5 degree Celsius reduction in gl…

The RPS cannot ignore the unfolding crisis in community pharmacy

Community pharmacy is the lifeblood of pharmacy and it breaks my heart to see the strain and pain the sector is under. Closures, shortages, abuse and chronic underfunding. People only have so much resilience, before they snap. I don’t need to write about how it is because you are living it, you wi…