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Chair of the health and social care committee Steve Brine and England's chief pharmacist David Webb are among a raft of speakers who will be addressing delegates at the 13th Annual Sigma Community Pharmacy Conference to be held in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic from Sunday (March 5). Day I of the conference will also feature a Q&A session with PSNC CEO Janet Morrison and her lead negotiator Mike Dent, which will be presented as a live webinar via YouTube for those unable to attend in person. Sigma Pharmaceuticals has invited all interested community pharmacists and stakeholders in the UK to join the 90 minutes session by clicking this link. Those joining the session will not only be able to listen to the Q&A session - which will run between 6.30PM and 8.00PM in UK on Sunday - but also ask questions to the PSNC executives via a live YouTube chat. Sigma says the operating landscape for community pharmacy has altered dramatically since it last held its 'away conference' in the Philippines in February 2020. The role of the independents - post pandemic - has rapidly evolved and has now been recognised by the health secretary as playing a significant part in the health of the nation.

Asian Media Group will hold the inaugural Pharmacy Business Diversity Conference on Thursday December 9 - a ground-breaking event exploring and showcasing diversity and inclusion in the pharmaceutical industry. The conference, themed 'Change the Ratio', will be be chaired by BBC presenter Clive Myrie and held virtually between 10am and 5pm. While both both RPS and ABPI are supporting the conference as associate sponsors, Well Pharmacy, the UK's largest independent pharmacy chain, is the headline sponsor of the event that will have some of Britain's most inspiring leaders and influential diversity and inclusion practitioners. These leaders will share their knowledge and experience whilst offering tangible steps to positively promote and implement diversity, inclusion and equality in workplace. Check pharmacy business website for more information.

The 14th Community Pharmacy Conference by Sigma Pharmaceuticals has been timely, prime minister Rishi Sunak said, noting that it coincided with the launch of Pharmacy First, a new initiative that enables patients to receive treatments for seven common conditions directly from a pharmacist without the need for a GP appointment or prescription. "We are all grateful for the tremendous contributions that pharmacists make to our NHS. The fantastic work you do is critical to the success of Pharmacy First and many other initiatives," Sunak said in a written message. The conference was organised from 25-29 February at Sun City in Johannesburg, South Africa, under the theme 'community pharmacy in an integrated NHS'. In a recorded video address to the Sigma Conference, shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said community pharmacies are 'critical' to the Labour party's mission to make the NHS 'fit for the future'. "You should be playing a much more significant role. Labour's reform agenda will get pharmacists working to the top of their licence. We want community pharmacists to play a greater role in healthcare, with more focus on their expertise in prescribing and medicines management," he said.

Amid media speculations that a large pharmacy multiple was putting all its stores at risk of closure, PSNC supremo Janet Morrison said the sector was in crisis and in danger of a significant collapse. Addressing delegates via a video link at Sigma Pharmaceutical's 13th Annual Community Pharmacy Conference held last week (March 4 -9) in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, she said while "a lot of consolidation or sales" would continue, a lot of the smaller, independently-owned community pharmacies - which had to work harder and harder to make ends meet - were just "hanging on in there". "But I don't know how much longer people can go on," she said, adding that the risk of actual closure was rendering the remaining pharmacies so fragile that "they may not be able to pick up the slack of many thousands of patients" who would need repeat prescriptions. "The disruption is frightful and awful. We have got 53 per cent of the population on repeat prescriptions, so that matters." Her comment on the opening day of the conference was a sober reminder that the sector - which relies heavily on income from prescriptions - couldn't afford to "carry on with the current format of a contract and the current amount of money" it was paid to deliver numerous tasks which have been heaped on it to share the burden of a crippling NHS.

The 14th Annual Community Pharmacy Conference by Sigma Pharmaceuticals began on Monday, 25 February at Sun City, South Africa. Dr. Bharat Shah, Manish Shah, and Kamal Shah, co-founders of the company, extended a warm welcome to the delegates in attendance at the event. In a written message, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak extended his best wishes to all the participants attending the conference. The message read: "This conference is timely as it coincides with the launch of the Pharmacy First, a new initiative launched across England that will enable patients to receive treatments for seven common conditions directly from a pharmacist without the need for a GP appointment or prescription." "We are all grateful for the tremendous contributions that pharmacists make to our NHS. The fantastic work you do is critical to the success of Pharmacy First and many other initiatives."

The National Pharmacy Association (NPA) has announced that the Chief Pharmaceutical Officer for England, David Webb will be among the keynote speakers at the Pharmacy Odyssey Conference on 13 October. He and other special guests will discuss the future of community pharmacy within the NHS, during a day of insight and practical advice for pharmacy teams. The NPA promises expert opinion on the current pressures in the sector and a thorough exploration of the long-term picture. NPA Director of Membership, Simon Tebbutt, explains: "With the NPA centenary in 2021 behind us, this will be a foray into the future - mapping the coming decade, and next half-century - as well as covering the many challenges of the present time." The theme of the conference, to be held online and sponsored by Novo Nordisk, is Pharmacy Odyssey: Services, Supply and Sustainability.

Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has backed pharmacists to play a greater clinical role in the health and well-being of the nation, describing them as "valuable and trusted" members of the community. Pharmacists have faced a difficult year with 222 community pharmacies closing in just the first six months. Boots alone will be closing 300 branches over the next 12 months. Sunak, however, insisted that his government knows the "hard work of pharmacy teams", and that he wants to "enable them to do more to support the NHS." Speaking at the annual Sigma Conference in London on Sunday (5 November), the prime minister reiterated that community pharmacy is in line for a much-needed boost in funding. "Earlier this year, the government announced plans for further investment of up to £645 million over the next few years to support the Pharmacy First service for patients," Sunak said in a letter read out at the conference by Lord Dolar Popat. "This means that community pharmacies will be able to assess patients and provide some options to protect them without a GP appointment."

The strength of any organisation lies in its people. This being a common norm in the world of business, several of them are taking healthy initiatives and opening discussions around gender diversity and equality. Panelists during a session on Empowering Women In the Workplace held during the Pharmacy Business Diversity Conference on Thursday (December 9), agreed that having gender diversity in business, not just benefits women, but the whole organisation. "It drives engagement, diversity of thinking and ultimately performance," said Ifti Khan, pharmacy superintendent at Well Pharmacy, in the session moderated by the conference chair and BBC presenter Clive Myrie. To substantiate his point, he cited a recent report by McKinsey & Company, as per which companies in the top quartile for ethnic and cultural diversity are 36 per cent more profitable than those in the fourth quartile.

Chief executive of the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee Janet Morrison has said government ministers are looking at the future of community pharmacy in England in a "bigger way" and have a vision to go "beyond the Scotland model". "I think they believe they're going beyond the Scotland model," she said, in her closing keynote at the 7th Annual Pharmacy Business Conference held in London on Sunday (May 14). Giving her views on the latest government funding - worth £645 million - for community pharmacy, the head of pharmacy negotiator, added: "Their thinking is for the future in a bigger and a more forward-thinking way." She added it was for the first time that community pharmacy has been seen "as part of primary care in a really fundamental way that gives us hope for the future". Morrison said the new funding uplift was effectively "for five quarters of activity," arguing that the common condition service won't start before December or early in the New Year due to the time it would take to get the IT systems up and running to support the rollout.

The issues related to race and ethnicity are common across the sectors, but the problem is not unsolvable, said panelists in a discussion on Race, Identity and Belonging In The Workplace, held during the Pharmacy Business Diversity Conference on Thursday (December 9). Creating safe and comfortable spaces and allowing authentic conversations is a precursor to resolving this big challenge, said Zaheer Ahmad MBE, global head of Inclusion and Diversity at GSK Consumer Healthcare. The session, moderated by the conference chair BBC presenter Clive Myrie, also had Asif Sadiq MBE, senior vice president at WarnerMedia for Equity and Inclusion, International, and Sathya Bala, founder & CEO of True Change and My Skin My Story, a growing global community for women of colour. Ahmad said encouraging open conversations is important as there is great discomfort and stigma attached to talking about it, and many times senior leaders fall short in their efforts not because they have racist views or they don't believe in advancing race and ethnicity, but because they are not aware.

Now is the best time for community pharmacy to integrate its model of NHS representation and support to ensure better outcomes for contractors, said James Wood, director of Contractor & LPC Support, Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC). It is important for the sector to adapt to the new landscape and address challenges such as workforce, digital data, integration of pharmacy services, and medicines optimisation, he said during the first session of the sixth annual Pharmacy Business Conference held online on Tuesday, September 21. Under the new system, every part of England will be covered by integrated care systems (ICSs) from April 2022. ICSs have been created to bring about big changes in how health and care services in England are planned, paid for and delivered. They are a key part of the direction of travel for the NHS as outlined in the NHS Long Term Plan.

With the UK government mandating a gender pay gap reporting by corporates and there is a lot of push for ethnicity pay gap report, there is a need for a similar push for having disability pay gap records, said Jay Muthu, director of Organization and People Capability at Entain Group. "I think we need to kind of lobby the government to make that happen, but unfortunately a lot of disability organisations are still fighting for the basic rights," Muthu said during a panel discussion on Disability Inclusion In The Workplace held during the Pharmacy Business Diversity Conference on Thursday (December 9). The session, moderated by the conference chair and BBC presenter Clive Myrie, also had Kate Nash OBE, founder and chief executive officer of Purple Space, which is the world's only professional development membership hub for disability employee resource groups. Muthu said: "The challenges are from both sides. There is obviously the societal stigma (attached with disability). There are corporations not being aware and not wanting to educate themselves, and then there is the government not really implementing the right kind of mechanisms to make it happen.

To help stop the pharmacists pay delay in Northern Ireland, the Pharmacists' Defence Association (PDA) will present a motion on fairer pay to the ICTU Biennial Delegate Conference, taking place from 5 to 7 July. The PDA motion states, "…there are other employers within the health system, that echo Agenda for Change terms, despite the fact they are essentially private businesses contracted to the NHS, not actually public bodies. While echoing the pay structure has some advantages, these employers also seek to unnecessarily delay pay increases on the basis that the NHS changes are so delayed. The Universities in Ulster Schools of Pharmacy are ranked as some of the highest in the UK. They are gifting our population with high calibre graduates destined to provide excellent patient care. These pharmacists want to stay in a job that helps patients. They want to deliver the care that they have spent years of time and often thousands of pounds to render themselves confident and capable."

At the Conservative Party Conference, PM Rishi Sunak pledged to raise the legal age every year to buy from those who were born in 2009. The proposed changes also encompass heated tobacco products, recognized as smoke-free alternatives that heat, not burn, tobacco to produce a distinct nicotine-containing aerosol compared to traditional cigarette smoke. The following move in a bid to "try and stop teenagers taking up cigarettes in the first place", and bring in restrictions to stop young people from vaping. PM Rishi Sunak spoke at the conference, "Last week I promised to create the first smoke-free generation and I am wasting no time to deliver on that promise.

Senior academic pharmacist, Professor Mahendra Patel, recently received an award for his outstanding contribution and support for the Nigerian community in the UK. The Medical Association of Nigerians across GB (MANSAG) conducted its two-day annual General and Scientific Conference on October 27 and 28 in London. The theme of the conference focussed on "Transforming Health Outcomes" to celebrate the contributions Nigerian doctors make to healthcare systems in the UK and globally. Dr Patel delivered an encouraging speech on "Leading Black And Minority Ethnic Population Research by BAME Researchers".

Dr Bharat Shah CBE regrets that neither community pharmacists nor pharmaceutical wholesalers in the UK have any control over how Category M reimbursement prices in Part VIII A of the Drug Tariff are determined. The co-founder and chief executive of Sigma Pharmaceuticals was speaking at a conference organised by Avicenna in West London on Sunday (March 6). Introduced into the Drug Tariff in April 2005, Category M is used to set the reimbursement prices of over 500 drugs. The Department of Health and Social Care makes the final decision on the amount of reimbursement (cost of drugs and appliances supplied against an NHS prescription form) and remuneration (fees paid as part of the NHS community pharmacy contract for the provision of a service).

Ms. Seema Verma lays out the plan to enhance quality in healthcare in the 2020 CMS Quality Conference. For the plan to execute in a meaningful way, the article discusses the chapter of strategy and implementation comprehensively.

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society and Scottish Academy of Medical Royal Colleges co-hosted the NHS Education for Scotland annual virtual conference to discuss the environmental impact of prescribing. One of the conclusions drawn from the conference on Thursday (April 28) stressed on environmentally sustainable prescribing should be embedded in undergraduate and postgraduate health care education. Delegates at the session said they or their teams needed more education. They also needed more information and resources when prescribing to be able to consider environmental issues. Sharon Pfleger, Consultant in Pharmaceutical Public Health at NHS Highland, told the session: "There's a lot of work to be done to reduce carbon emissions. The NHS has identified the use of metered-dose inhalers as its second biggest cause of carbon emissions as the propellant gases have significant global warming potential.

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) Director for Scotland Clare Morrison participated in the panel discussion alongside representatives from other health professional organisations on tackling the workforce crisis at the SNP conference in Aberdeen on 8 October. At the conference, the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care committed to achieving protected learning time for health professionals. Morrison welcomed the Cabinet Secretary's statement as fantastic news for pharmacists across Scotland. "RPS Scotland will follow up the discussion by writing to the Cabinet Secretary to request a meeting to discuss achieving protected learning time, the forthcoming results of our workforce wellbeing survey, and positive examples of how pharmacy teams have improved the well-being of their teams," said the society.

Mental health has become a major concern worldwide and across all sectors,including pharmacy and pharmaceutical industry. The penetration of the issue exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic, due to mental fatigue, anxiety and most importantly the social distancing. Therefore, building an environment of trust and comfort is utmost essential to understand and tackle mental health challenges, said panelists in a discussion on Mental Health And Wellbeing In The Workplace, held during the Pharmacy Business Diversity Conference on Thursday (December 9).Talking in context of workplace, Monika Misra, head of Employee Health and Wellbeing, Europe and MEA, said: "We really need to create an environment of trust where we a have the manager, really trying to understand the unique challenges and needs of the individual, but be also ensuring that the individual feels comfortable to open up and have that conversation with their manager."