The Guild acknowledges the need for focus and consolidation within the pharmacy professional leadership space. The establishment of the new UK Pharmacy Professional Leadership (PPL) Advisory Board is a step in realising this.

In February 2023, we wrote to the PPL commission members to highlight, from our perspective, the need to include GHP as both a professional and trade union association in any professional leadership body formed to ensure the voice of working pharmacists would be represented. We participated in stakeholder groups across the UK to discuss the role of this body, as well as providing support in more individualised meetings with professional leadership stakeholders.

We posed the challenge of envisaging a leadership entity within the disciplines of medicine or nursing without the inclusion of the British Medical Association or Royal College of Nursing.

In March 2023 we received a response acknowledging the Guild’s role as a wider stakeholder. However, since then, we have received feedback that professional associations, as part of trade unions, will not formally be welcomed at the newly established independent, advisory public body. Our future role and the role of trade unions is yet to be fully recognised.

Although disappointed with this outcome, we note that this means we retain an unconstrained voice for the working pharmacist in the managed sector, and reserve the right to support or challenge any future direction that the Board may take.

We will continue to defend our member interests and proactively advocate for the development of the profession alongside the inextricable linkage to commensurate terms and conditions.

Nathan Burley – President

On behalf of Guild Council