Chief Pharmaceutical Officer (CPhO) clinical fellows are playing a key role working on inclusive pharmacy practice (IPP) projects at NHS England and partner organisations. Here a selection of former clinical fellows discuss why IPP is important to them and their related projects.
- Visit the Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management website to find out more about clinical fellow schemes.
The 2022/23 CPhO clinical fellows were working on the current CPhO Office IPP Delivery Plan’s focus of improving the diversity of people in senior pharmacy leadership roles.
Inclusive pharmacy practice projects
Centre for Pharmacy Postgraduate Education
Indi Kaur, Chief Pharmaceutical Officer’s Clinical Fellow
IPP embraces cultural competence, which involves understanding and respecting diverse cultural beliefs and practices. Pharmacy professionals who are culturally competent can communicate effectively with staff and patients from different backgrounds, address cultural barriers to care, and provide culturally appropriate NHS services. This improves staff and patient satisfaction, and reduces misunderstandings or conflicts related to cultural differences.
We are setting up an internal senior leader reciprocal mentoring pilot scheme for NHS England’s Pharmacy Advisory Group of senior pharmacy professional leaders. Reciprocal mentoring is about understanding the lived experiences of each unique individual as a whole and connecting at a human level. This enables those involved to shift their shared understanding and awareness into powerful action, championing change, influencing peers, and informing decision making throughout the organisation. The scheme aims to address the diversity and inclusion gap within senior pharmacy professional leadership by encouraging people from diverse backgrounds to participate in mentoring relationships. It also seeks to create a more inclusive and supportive environment within the Pharmacy Advisory Group, and build a culture of mentoring and continuous learning.
Medicines Value and Access, NHS England
Vivian De Vittoris, Chief Pharmaceutical Officer’s Clinical Fellow,
IPP is important as it ensures an equitable and respectful environment where staff and their contributions are valued. This helps drive high quality patient care and is fundamental in tackling some of our challenges in recruitment, retention and staff wellbeing.
I am involved in the delivery of IPP regional diversity in senior pharmacy professional leadership work. This involves working with leads in the Midlands region to understand the data and the lived experiences, and to identify opportunities for improvement as well as areas of good practice for potential adoption and spread.
Through this project I hope I can support creating an environment where people are comfortable with uncomfortable conversations in a way that is productive and progressive, as we work towards ensuring everyone has equal access to career opportunities. I hope this work will complement the wider IPP programme in ensuring our organisations and professions are led by colleagues that reflect our populations and workforce.
Workforce, Training and Education Directorate, NHS England
Vernise Daji – Chief Pharmaceutical Officer’s Clinical Fellow
Inclusivity fosters a sense of belonging, appreciation and wellbeing, enabling individuals to be their best selves at work. It is evident we have a long way to go in terms of improving equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) within our pharmacy workforce. IPP ensures that the EDI agenda is a national priority and that there is accountability and leadership to drive positive change. Diversity should be celebrated and fairness has always been core to my values and beliefs. As a British Asian woman, I would like to see more people who look like me in senior pharmacy professional leadership.
I am working on the IPP regional diversity in senior pharmacy professional leadership work in the South West of England. I hope that we can identify and showcase successful EDI initiatives to adopt and spread elsewhere and implement targeted EDI initiatives to help improve the representation of ethnic minorities within senior pharmacy professional leadership.
General Pharmaceutical Council
Helen Ireland, Chief Pharmaceutical Officer’s Clinical fellow
IPP is vital to making the workplace more inclusive for all pharmacists and pharmacy technicians. Pharmacy teams that better reflect the diversity of the communities and people we serve, will enable different viewpoints to be considered so that service outcomes such as health inequalities can be improved.
I am part of a team reviewing the experience of black trainee pharmacists during their training and also EDI within revalidation. I hope the learning from this work can inform actions to give all trainee pharmacists an excellent training experience and further how EDI features within revalidation.
NHS England and Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management
Aiysha Raoof, Regional Clinical Leadership Fellow
The IPP foundations align with my values and beliefs; the role and responsibilities for ensuring equity and eradicating discrimination sit on all our shoulders. Seeing our diverse profession taking steps towards acknowledging the need for change and pledging towards IPP resonates with me. Being an avid advocate for equity and EDI to improve patient and workforce care, I understand the need for this work.
Through our work with the IPP Delivery Group, I hope that pharmacy teams can ensure safe spaces, education provisions, and cultures open to change. I believe IPP is a step towards ensuring equity in pharmacy, from workforce talent management to education and patient care. IPP and the Pharmacy Workforce Race Equality Standard (PWRES) are crucial in the role of pharmacy teams to eliminate discrimination. In my fellowship, I actively work with my regional chief pharmacist in encouraging IPP as a cross-cutting theme in workstreams. Within my wider portfolio role, IPP is championed as good practice, supporting multi-disciplinary teams and systems in health inequalities and EDI agendas.
Former clinical fellows led on IPP projects and they continue to promote, advocate for and implement IPP in pharmacy practice and beyond.
Health Innovation Network South London
Natasha Callender, Senior Project Manager (medicines workstream lead)
The Inclusive Pharmacy Practice (IPP) programme from its inception in 2020 aimed to tackle workforce inequalities in the pharmacy professions and better equip pharmacy professionals to address health inequalities through professional practice. The programme started with race and ethnicity in response to the amplification of racial and ethnic disparities during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and the extent to which those disparities were noted across several other factors that shape our identity.
The IPP principles outlined the pharmacy professions’ commitment to fairness and belonging, valuing all people, and adopting a culture of zero tolerance to all kinds of harassment, bullying and discrimination in the workplace. In my final year in the Chief Pharmaceutical Officer’s Office, I approached the Workforce Race Equality Standard Team to start working on the first Pharmacy Workforce Race Equality Standard (PWRES). This first iteration is a starting point using data that is accessible using a tried and tested approach. The PWRES provides the first national overview of the varied experiences registered pharmacy professionals face, it outlines the scale of the challenge to inform meaningful action and it aims to help NHS trusts to improve.
Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
Aileen O’Hare Deputy Chief Pharmacist
Inclusive leadership involves being compassionate, inspiring and forward looking. Inclusive Leadership Training aligns with the Our NHS People Promise and is transferrable to any stage of a pharmacy career. Evidence-based articles such as The King’s Fund – Improving NHS Culture and Harvard Business Review -The Key to Inclusive Leadership informed the development of a pharmacy department leadership and management community of practice (CoP) at Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. Pharmacy staff at Band 8A and 8B received structured training on inclusive leadership, developing people and cultural competence. Senior leaders from the Trust’s People and Culture team were invited to provide relevant sessions reflecting the CoP objectives. CoP can help pharmacy professionals to implement change.
Midlands Leadership Academy
Dr Jaswinder Dhap, Senior Primary Care Programme Manager
Coaching and mentoring are powerful tools that can be used by aspiring, emerging and established leaders to support IPP. In pharmacy, the importance of coaching and mentoring is widely recognised, with offers available from organisations such as the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, CPPE, and the NHS Leadership Academy. With a deeper understanding of sponsoring, mentors take a more action-oriented approach and actively contribute to the mentee’s career growth. Mentors offer advice and guidance in key development areas, while sponsors are more personally involved in their mentee’s career journey. By engaging in formal and informal coaching, mentoring, and sponsoring, students, trainees, and early-career pharmacy professionals can become experts in their clinical field and advance to senior management and leadership positions.
Digital, Personalised and Genomic Medicine, Moorfields Eye Hospital
Stephanie Ghartey, Advanced Specialist Pharmacist
Improving health inequities is not just about improving patients’ health but also improving the lives of the people who deliver care to patients. Compassionate leadership incorporates fairness and inclusion which results in staff giving better support, higher quality care and therefore higher patient satisfaction. As a compassionate leader it is important that your staff have three core needs met: Autonomy, Belonging and Contribution.
Leaders who are compassionate and inclusive focus on relationships through listening, empathising and supporting. They are impactful and influential with staff and patients. This approach was applied in North Central London to develop a new accessible pathway for patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) to achieve the NICE guideline CG143 target of 100% patients to receive pain medication within 30 minutes of presenting to hospital. Many patients with SCD are from African and Caribbean backgrounds who often have poorer clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction due to lack of understanding and discrimination which leads to distrust from patients and the wider community.
To create long-lasting change:
- Use data and patient lived experiences
- Co-engagement with patient, staff, community
- Advocate and draw attention to SCD
- Transform clinical pathways
- Transform lives
NHS London Procurement Partnership
Denise Rosembert, Assistant Director for Medicines Optimisation
We have developed a draft NHS England recruitment checklist, with the aim of achieving better EDI through job advertisements, job descriptions and candidate selection. The workforce should reflect the local population it serves, and enablers outlined in the checklist support a more inclusive and diverse approach to recruitment and retention. This in turn can result in equitable access, excellent experience and optimal patient outcomes.
We applied evidence based behavioural change techniques to inform the checklist, providing direction to colleagues on how to implement changes to the recruitment process and explaining why it is important to do so. I worked with the executive leadership team, EDI team and pharmacy senior management teams at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and the EDI team at NHS England to socialise the approach. The checklist is currently being piloted by colleagues at NHS England, arm’s length bodies and some acute trusts.
Bart’s Health NHS Trust
Jagjot Chahal, Cardiovascular Prevention Lead Pharmacist, Bart’s Health NHS Trust
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is one of the conditions most strongly associated with health inequalities. People living in England’s most deprived areas are almost four times more likely to die prematurely of CVD than those in the least deprived area. The Hewitt Review recommends that population health, prevention and health inequalities should be part of the training and continuing development for all professions and embedded in the national workforce plan.
North-East London ICB is using the opportunity for healthcare professionals to learn from local communities as part of the Innovation for Healthcare Inequalities Programme. This focuses on cardiovascular disease prevention using the Core20PLUS5 approach, where pathways are being developed using tools such as SHAPE, data from CVDPREVENT, quality improvement methodologies and local community insights. Read more about healthcare inequalities.