General Information

Who should attend?
Anyone who is interested in the future direction of pharmacy including undergraduate and postgraduate students, practising pharmacists, educators and related health-professionals.

Conference Background
'Prepare for the Future' has been organised to mark the opening of the new School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Central Lancashire. The conference will consider changes in the profession of pharmacy and how new and developing technologies will have an impact on pharmacy practice and science. How should the profession develop/adapt to meet future challenges and opportunities?

The profession of pharmacy is in an evolutionary phase. Major reforms in the way in which the profession will be regulated have been announced in a recent White Paper on the regulation of health professionals. A General Pharmaceutical Council is to be established to regulate the profession and a "professional body" is proposed to provide clinical and professional leadership. New pharmacy legislation in the form of the Section 60 Order will also have a tremendous impact on the profession. The new pharmacy contract introduced in 2005 has provided pharmacists with exciting opportunities to more fully utilise their range of skills by expanding the range of services that can be provided such as medicines use reviews, promotion of healthy lifestyles and independent prescribing. Pharmacists are now having greater clinical input and patient contact, and are able to provide unique input as part of an integrated team of healthcare providers. The important changes that have occurred in the profession in recent years will be considered, including how Government policy is driving these changes. The Pharmacy 2020 project was launched in 2006 and aims to identify the challenges and drivers that affect the profession's ability to fulfill its potential in health care provision, to identify good practice in pharmacy and to prepare a forward strategy to take pharmacy to the year 2020.

Given the changes that are taking place in pharmacy it is not surprising that the Royal Pharmaceutical Society has initiated a consultation on education in pharmacy. An update on the consultation exercise Principles of Pharmacy Education and Training will be provided with a review of how pharmacy education has been delivered historically and how pharmacy education must change so that future pharmacists can meet the requirements and demands of the changing profession.

In addition to changes in the pharmacist's professional role, emerging technologies are also going to have a tremendous impact on the future direction of pharmacy. A number of these technologies will be considered:

• An overview of new and developing drug delivery technologies will be provided with an emphasis on nanotechnologies. Nanocarriers are being developed which offer great potential benefits to patients and new opportunities for pharmaceutical and drug delivery companies.
• The impact of pharmacogenomics on the future of medicine will be discussed. Current knowledge of the the influence of genetic variation on drug response in patients has demonstrated that for certain diseases we can improve therapy using "personalised medicines", in which drugs and drug combinations are optimised for each individual's unique genetic makeup.
• We are in the midst of the 'Communications Revolution'. Information Technology has had a tremendous impact on our daily lives, with networks such as the Internet enabling information to be easily accessed and exchanged irrespective of geographical location. The NHS Connecting for Health programme is an ambitious attempt to bring modern computer systems into the NHS with a view to improving patient care and services. The aim is to connect over 30,000 GPs in England to almost 300 hospitals and give patients access to their personal health and care information. This will transform the way the NHS works. An overview of the programme will be presented together with the current status, and how the new system will have an impact on the pharmacist.

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