Working together to be the best that pharmacy can be

By Sir Hugh Taylor, Independent Chair of the UK Pharmacy Professional Leadership Advisory Board

Our Board meeting on 10th December 2024 provided a good opportunity to reflect on the work of the Board over the past year. We have taken important steps forward and the progress we have made is testament to our joint commitment to openness, transparency and collaboration.

This year, we have reached out to more stakeholders through the Pharmacy Stakeholder Forum and Patient and Public Reference Group. Both have provided excellent contributions to discussions and useful challenges to our work. We know that patients and the public have the potential to be pharmacy’s greatest advocates, and we are pleased the meetings have given us a sense of just how important pharmacy is to them.

The Programme Sub-Committee met for the first time in November. It has continued the work of the Board in taking forward the UK Commission's findings, prioritising work around education and training for post-registration pharmacy technicians and for newly qualified pharmacists with prescribing rights, and a fresh look at issues around professional standards and scope of practice.

We have also embraced opportunities to speak out as a collective body, responding to both the NHS 10-Year Health Plan engagement exercise for England and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s (RPS) announcement of its proposed Royal College for Pharmacy. This is something we must continue to do, to build confidence in – and an understanding of – our role as an advisory Board.

We are all committed to working together to co-create a new, sustainable and inclusive model for pharmacy professional leadership (PPL) in the future. We recognise that the RPS’s proposals are a potentially important step in that direction: enabling the RPS to create, as a minimum, a more flexible, adaptable, outward-looking governance model that facilitates future UK-wide collaboration.

That is of course a matter for RPS members to decide. But the prospect of a Royal College that seeks to represent wider pharmacy is clearly an opportunity to be bigger, bolder and more all-embracing in our approach to collective pharmacy leadership in the future. As and when that time comes, which we hope it will, it will have implications for all the pharmacy organisations on our Board – and beyond.

That is where the Board comes in. Co-creation of such a model, whatever final form it takes, is not a 'nice to have'. It is a condition of success. It requires clarity on process; opportunity for all parties to engage, contribute and agree an inclusive way forward that works for everyone; sensitivity to different national and professional interests; and the meaningful engagement of patients and the public.

All this is within the Board’s remit to promote and facilitate; and the RPS has confirmed its openness to work with the Board and all its members on this basis, as and when the time comes: an opportunity that all the members of the Board welcomed.

Crucially a future model would need to appeal to all those who have currently chosen not to be a member of a professional leadership body (PLB) or specialist professional group (SPG). Therefore, the Board’s collective job is actively to find a way to make professional leadership mean something to everyone working in pharmacy across the UK. A major development at this Board meeting was the approval of a national engagement exercise on a draft Vision and Common Purpose for PPL as a means for beginning this important piece of work.

Members of the Board’s Communications and Engagement Sub-Committee have worked together to create a proposed Vision and Common Purpose and – in a first for pharmacy – the engagement activity in February 2025 will be led collectively by the eight PLBs and SPGs. The whole approach is grounded in collaboration, and we hope this UK-wide conversation sets the tone for the wider change we hope to achieve. We look forward to hearing the feedback at the next Board meeting in March.

Collaborative leadership for pharmacy is something that will not only benefit our organisations today but will shape the landscape for years to come. Although the route is still to be determined and there will, no doubt, be bumps along the way, we must not lose sight of our destination.

As a Board, we are building trust among organisations. We are working at a good pace, focusing on the important work relating to education and training, professional standards and scope of practice, and having open and constructive conversations. I look forward to seeing how these conversations evolve over the coming months as we move towards a more unified and collaborative UK-wide future that enables pharmacy to be the best it can be, recognised nationally and internationally.