To ensure that hospital pharmacy is appropriately represented in the professional body, we need hospital pharmacists to renew their membership. Membership from all sectors gives us the ability to be a powerful and effective voice outside our profession and represent our profession on the national agenda.

We know the important role pharmacists play in the hospital sector, and as a hospital pharmacist we know that you already have a number of organisations which can support you in your daily practice, helping you to provide the best possible service for your patients. Rather than replicate these existing excellent services, we’re supporting these organisations in a collaborative way to ensure existing member expertise is used to promote development of the profession.

Here are some of the ways we’ve been doing this in 2011:

• Support to help you develop evaluation skills
Through our research tools, support for clinical audit, support for the QIPP agenda and our map of evidence. Developing your evaluation skills is about sharing good practice and building the evidence base. It will also contribute to any courses you are undertaking or anyone that you are supervising.

• Medicines, Ethics and Practice
Our new look MEP was completely revamped in 2011, with a much greater focus on professionalism and putting professional judgment at the heart of the decision-making process. It provides you with support for professional practice and dilemmas.

• Leadership Competency Framework
The LCF was launched to support the development of leaders at all career stages and all levels of practice. It is designed to be read and used in conjunction with any learning and development activity and performance assessment tools you currently use. LCF is designed to support people across the team- whether that be you or someone YOU supervise. We also recognise the leadership shown by hospital pharmacy and are working with leaders and specialists to ensure our professional voice is heard

• Raising the profile of the profession
We know have partnership agreements in place with over 30 expert and specialist groups. Working together we are able to respond to media enquiries, providing expert comment on any medicines related issue.

• Mentor service
We launched our mentor-mentee matching service, allowing members to search for a mentor who meets their specific needs. We know mentoring is a huge issue in pharmacy. We want to recognise the mentoring that exists and provide a network for mentees and those wanting to be a mentor across all elements of hospital practice.

• Support alerts
We launched our support alert email service to let you know about any urgent patient safety issues. This is part of our suite of email services including E-news, e-alerts and events emails

• Online networks
We’ve grown our networks in 2011 providing you with more opportunities to interact with colleagues regardless of where you are based. We have a hospital forum, a group for pre-reg tutors as well as one for consultant pharmacists.

• Transfer of care
We’re leading the work to ensure the safe transfer of information when patients move between care settings – a vital step in breaking down the barriers between primary and secondary care. This included specific guidance for members explaining what it meant for them. We know there are many examples where hospital pharmacists provide excellent transfer of care- please let us know and engage with our early adopter model.

• Management of VTE
We’ve been working with four royal colleges on the management of VTE. We are leading on the medicines issues that are so vital in this area. Many hospital experts are leading in the field to show how important it is for pharmacy to play its recognised role

Looking ahead to 2012 we will continue to support you in your role. Here are some of the key priorities we are working on:

• Professional standards for hospital pharmacy and public health
Our professional standards will look at workforce, professional development, capacity as well as sharing the principles of good practice. We have engaged hospital leaders from across GB to develop standards that are useful, practical but also influential in practice.

• Medicines safety
The number one priority for our members, in 2012 we’re working with the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges on standards for medicines management in care homes

• Modernising Pharmacy Careers
We’re continuing to work with MPC to ensure there is a clear career pathway for pharmacists, with support for foundation and early years as well as recognition of advancement through to consultant level.

• MEP edition 36
We’ll launch edition 36 of MEP in July, building on the success of edition 35.

• Daily news alerts
We’re launching a new service so you can find out about the health stories making the headlines without having to read all the papers, helping you to be prepared for any questions from patients.

• Transfer of care
We’ll start to see the outputs from our early adopter sites, including evidence of how front line pharmacists ensure patients have the right medicines as they return home after a hospital stay.

As well as all this you’ll continue to receive your regular copy of the Pharmaceutical Journal, as well as getting access to all our online resources, such as CPD support and support for clinical audit. If you subscribe to it, you’ll also receive your regular copy of Clinical Pharmacist.

Your membership.

Your professional body.

We can only do this with your continued support.