This September, Boots has joined the FIP World Congress of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. With over 3,000 delegates who travelled to Glasgow to attend, the congress is one of the biggest gathering of pharmacists internationally, and it’s one of the key pharmacy events of the year.

The theme this year is Pharmacy: Transforming outcomes; bringing together pharmacy practitioners and pharmaceutical scientists from around the world to consider ways of extending the role of pharmacists so that they play a full part in ensuring patients, and health systems, achieve full benefit from the medicines people take.

Marc Donovan, Chief Pharmacist for Boots joined the speaker programme to highlight the changing role of community pharmacies and how we can work together to improve patient safety and add value. He said: “Healthcare needs in the UK are changing. With demographic shifts and increasing use of technology and self-care, there are more people being treated in primary care; but with fewer GPs and increasing pressure on the NHS, the role of pharmacy is evolving to support changing patient needs and NHS demands. We believe that pharmacy, working in collaboration with policy makers, healthcare providers and academics, can add more value to patients and healthcare systems, and that pharmacists have a role to play in working with GPs in new models of care.”

Boots also had three academic papers that were presented in the poster exhibition at the conference: “Point prevalence audit of care home residents and carers across the UK in the appropriate use of antibiotics”, “Antibiotic consumption in care homes across the United Kingdom; baseline data”, and “Role of a Research Governance framework as an enabler to community pharmacy practice based research”.

In its 78th year, this is the first time that the FIP World Congress has been held in the UK for nearly 40 years, making it a truly unique learning opportunity for pharmacists and pharmaceutical scientists in the UK. Each year, it moves to a new country, where it puts a spotlight on how pharmacy works in that market. Last year, it was held in Seoul, South Korea.