Like our pharmacy family, we have faced our own challenges at the charity in the last 18 months.

Our small team moved to permanent home working, adapting quickly to ensure that our services were unaffected, making a significant move to digital support and communications. In addition, despite the much-appreciated efforts of our fundraising heroes, our income took a huge hit. Yet, in spite of all this, we managed to come together, leverage our resources, and turn the setbacks into positives with some amazing outcomes. We continue to build on our successes, recently launching a new counselling service. I am so proud of what our team has achieved over the past year and a half.

As a charity focused on wellbeing, we encourage and support pharmacy teams to share and celebrate accomplishments together. This theme of positivity is very much something which I like to foster within our charity .

As we have just released our 2020 annual report, I would like to share some of the charity’s achievements with you today.

The team, alongside our committed volunteers, ensured that we continued to deliver our free and confidential support throughout the pandemic to assist those facing difficult times.  Despite the challenges, during 2020 we provided over 1,500 acts of support through our support services, this included providing 92 grants, dealing with 1,225 enquiries, making 221 specialist advice referrals and supporting 17 people with addiction issues. Additionally, working closely with other organisations across the profession, we continued to provide a voice for those adversely affected and worked together to provide information on both changes within the profession and the support available to our pharmacy family.

Working proactively to support wellbeing, back in May 2020 we developed and launched our first ever ACTNow wellbeing campaign. Through the campaign and our newly developed Wardley Wellbeing Hub, we provided a whopping 10,107 acts of support. This achievement is in line with our aspirations set out in our five-year strategy – one of which is to improve access to wellbeing support and enable pharmacists to better manage their wellbeing and avoid reaching a crisis point. Another one of our strategic objectives is to raise awareness of the charity to enable us to help more people, and in 2020 we did that, achieving a 75% increase in awareness of the charity.  Through our digital development we were able to take our formerly face-to-face wellbeing workshops online and participate in many online events too.

The above is only a handful of the successes achieved by the charity, and that’s just counting 2020 alone. Please do read our full annual Impact Report which includes personal stories from those we have helped.

I am proud of the work we do to support such a caring profession. I am equally proud to work for Pharmacist Support and alongside such committed colleagues striving to make a positive impact for our pharmacy family.

This article first appeared in Natural Pharmacy Business Magazine’s August/September Publication.