10th December 2025
A special event has been held to celebrate and thank the amazing service user representatives who are part of our Pharmacy Personal and Public Advisory Group.
This group was formed back in June 2024 to share ideas and real lived experiences on how we can make pharmacy and medicines services safer and more efficient. The group consists of service users and carers who have worked closely with the SPPG pharmacy team and other healthcare professionals and have helped shape improvements to existing community pharmacy services and supported the development of new ones—all with a focus on safety and quality and improving health literacy.
Over the past year, the group has played a key role in designing resources and patient information leaflets including a Shingles poster for the Pharmacy First service, a patient information leaflet on managing Diabetes and development of a poster encouraging the greener disposal of inhaler waste. These materials will help improve health literacy, empower patients to take greater control of their health and ultimately achieve better health outcomes.
In addition, the group has co-designed and co-delivered training to community pharmacists to raise awareness of the challenges faced by carers in a community setting. They have also contributed to the development of Northern Ireland’s adaptation of the World Health Organization’s ‘5 Moments for Medication Safety’ patient engagement tool.
At the event, Kathryn Turner summed it up perfectly:
“We’re proud to recognise the incredible contributions of our service user representatives who help shape safer, smarter pharmacy services. Your insights make a real difference, thank you for being part of this journey!”
Speaking at the event service user Cathy Malcom said,
“This group, in such a short space of time coming together, has had some massive change. We have fed into initiatives around diabetes, asthma, and a very important piece of work around carers, which was really around raising the awareness for community pharmacists around the needs of carers. It has given us an opportunity to link in with Community Pharmacy and to give feedback on to different initiatives, to attend workshops around co-production and co-commissioning, deliver presentations, and in terms of capacity-building, skills, and experience, and knowledge. Also we are making a positive difference to the system, as well as, in terms of recruitment perspective, we’ve new members want to come on board, so I think the fact that the group is growing shows that it’s working.”
Also attending the event service user Darren Stinson said,
“I got involved with the Pharmacy Advisory Group because about 15 years ago I left full-time employment to help my mum look after my late father. My mum was a former nurse, and when my dad died about a year later, I decided to stay part-time, and I’ve been caring for my mum as main carer full-time ever since, and my mum is 94 next month. It would be my experience of, say, pharmacy services as an end user and dealing with, the local pharmacy, the community, and I had to arrange repeat prescriptions for mum who wouldn’t be that confident doing it herself and ensuring that she takes medication on time as well as managing GP appointments and things like referrals and check-ups, and is everything still needed is a question that would come up annually. So it would be that experience that I would have that I could add to this Group.”
A huge thank you to everyone involved.