Medicines sit at the centre of almost every patient interaction across the NHS. Yet the systems designed to support their safe and effective use remain fragmented, unevenly digitised, and often disconnected from the realities of frontline care. While policy ambition around digital transformation has accelerated, the practical conditions needed to translate data into better medicines use have not always kept pace. These themes shaped the fifth roundtable in the UK Medicines Po

As the NHS undergoes profound technological, educational and workforce shifts, pharmacy must evolve alongside it. The fourth roundtable of the UK Medicines Policy Series, hosted by the Global Policy Network (GPN), examined this moment of transition through a unifying lens: innovation. Chair Reena Patel captured the purpose of the session clearly: “We will explore the future of the profession through that lens of innovation and explore how pharmacy can drive better outcomes th

The NHS is asking more of pharmacists than ever before, yet the systems designed to support them have not kept pace. As workforce pressures intensify across the health service, pharmacy at a critical juncture: highly trained, widely accessible, and increasingly essential, but still constrained by structural barriers. Today, that is evolving into a new strategic frontier, one that asks; " How do we develop and utilise the pharmacy workforce to meet growing system needs?". Thi

In Britain’s crowded primary care landscape, pharmacists occupy a quiet corner. Pressure across healthcare systems in the United Kingdom (UK) has increased in recent years, while community pharmacy has remained limited in authority. Today, this silent resilience is on the verge of a discreet yet significant transformation: from clinical urgency to strategic transitions. By embedding Independent Prescribing (IP) as a lever for the future of primary care, we aim to translate pa

It's time to stop viewing pharmacy as a simple transaction and start recognising it as afoundational pillar of modern healthcare. This was one of the central messages of the first roundtable of the UK Medicine Policy series hosted by the Global Policy Network (GPN) on June 25, 2025. The roundtable brought together colleagues from the NHS, industry, the Commonwealth, and international health systems, fostering the cross-sector dialogue essential for transformative change. It w