At Pharmacist Support, we’re mission and vision focused. If you’re a long-standing supporter of the charity, you’ll know that we’re constantly reviewing our activities, researching and talking to people across the sector to ensure that we understand how we can best support our pharmacy family. 2021 is set to be another exciting year for the charity as we continue to develop and expand our reach. 

Celebrating charity milestones 

We love a good celebration here at the charity and this year marks some exciting milestones for us! We’ll be celebrating 180 years of providing charitable support to the profession and 25 years of our peer-to-peer telephone support service Listening Friends – delivered by a dedicated group of volunteers. We’re delighted as part of these celebrations to announce the expansion of our wellbeing offer and enhancement of our volunteer schemes.  

Developing our services 

At the end of 2020 we ran a Workforce Wellbeing Survey with the RPS, the results of which are helping us shape our plans for the next 12 months. It’s our ambition this year to better tailor our support, ensuring it reflects and meets the needs of everyone in our pharmacy family – be they students, trainees or pharmacists from all sectors and backgrounds. As such, we’re pleased to be starting 2021 on a proactive footing with a series of wellbeing workshops and chats with the RPS.

Working with the sector 

In addition, we’ll be continuing to establish and develop relationships with like-minded organisations. Having donated over £110,000 to the charity over the past three years through their £1 per member pledge and member donations, we’re delighted to announce that the PDA will be continuing on this journey in partnership with us. Joining them again this year is Well Pharmacy whose CEO Seb Hobbs repeated his donation to the charity and spoke of how vital it is to have ‘an independent charity focused on supporting the health and wellbeing of pharmacists’ right now. We look forward to sharing more on these collaborations over the coming months. 

Throughout February we’re collaborating once again with the BPSA on their Let’s Talk Mental Health campaign, kicking off on Time to Talk Day (Feb 4th) to help raise awareness of mental health among pharmacy students. 

Engaging with our pharmacy family

On the theme of ‘talk’, we’re also keen to continue engaging with members of our pharmacy family willing to share their wellbeing story, successes and learnings through what has been an incredibly challenging 12 months.

Although we may not be able to come together physically to celebrate our significant milestone this year, we hope that you’ll connect with us at some point across the year, chat with us on one of our social media channels, help us raise awareness of our free and confidential support, use and share our resources or join us in one of our virtual events or activities. Join us and help champion the wellbeing of our pharmacy family. Take care all and look after one another.