Irish pharmacists must self-organise to establish a professional voice that is distinct from the other voices on the landscape, writes Dr Catriona Bradley
Summer 2026 has certainly been a special one. With an extended stretch of glorious sunny days, it felt like Ireland finally remembered how to do summer properly. The messages I received from friends and family holidaying abroad were different from those of other years. As extreme temperatures were endured across Europe and news filtered through that Ireland was doing summer in style, the messages changed from the familiar ‘wish you were here’, to the more unusual ‘wish I was there!’
Holidays aside, I have thought about Irish pharmacists and pharmacy teams many times over the past few months and found myself thinking, ‘Gosh, I wish you were here’. Not because of any single event, conference or conversation, but because of the consistency of what I have been seeing and hearing. Irish pharmacy is making extraordinary progress. The difficulty is that many pharmacists are understandably too busy, stretched or disconnected from national conversations to see the scale of change taking place around them.
That, I think, may be one of our greatest challenges. The people in the room at conferences, debates and policy discussions are a tiny proportion of the profession. A hundred people may hear a message. Thousands more are not there. They are in pharmacies, hospitals, industry, regulatory roles, lecture halls and workplaces, doing the difficult work of practice. And so, while pharmacy may be changing rapidly, many pharmacists may not yet feel, or even see, that change.
If you are reading this while grabbing a quick cup of tea during a busy day, perhaps in a dispensary with no backup and no formal break, conversations about professional strategy, policy reform and future opportunity may feel very far away from your reality. I understand that. But the progress I have seen is not happening somewhere else, achieved by someone else. It is being built every day by pharmacists and pharmacy teams who may not realise that their work is part of something much larger than themselves.
I wished more pharmacists could have heard the Minister for Health speak at the opening sessions of the IPU conference in May about the contribution of Irish pharmacists to healthcare. Whatever the politics of the day, it is welcome to hear public recognition of the positive impact that community pharmacists make to the health and wellbeing of patients and communities. The Minister expressed appreciation for pharmacists’ contribution to increasing national vaccination rates and reducing respiratory presentations in emergency departments. She also spoke of her desire for further expansion of services in community pharmacy and recognised the professionalism of the IPU during the 2025 contract negotiations. Whatever one’s view of policies, politics or politicians, recognition of good work matters.
There was another moment at the IPU conference that stayed with me:
The transition from outgoing president Tom Murray to incoming president Caoimhe McAuley. The handing over of the chain of office was followed by a hug that seemed to express genuine respect and collegiality.
The transition felt seamless, with McAuley easily picking up the messaging from Murray’s welcome address. It was professional, respectful and welcome; a rare moment when different parts of community pharmacy appeared to be singing from the same hymn sheet.
At the IPU Great Debate, the country’s Chief Medical Officer described the relationship between herself and the Chief Nursing Officer, popping into each others’ offices, collaborating on the health-system challenges of the day. She expressed excitement at the prospect of expanding their duo to a trio with the anticipated appointment of a Chief Pharmaceutical Officer (CPO) to the Department of Health and urged conference attendees to consider applying for this exciting role so they could help bring practice insight into the Department to help shape the direction of pharmacy in Ireland. That message was endorsed by the Minister.
What was not apparent then was that few, if any, in the room would be eligible to apply or even express an interest in the CPO role, as eligibility was confined to staff on secondment from one of three organisations: The Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland, the Health Service Executive, or the Health Products Regulatory Authority. It is also unclear whether the opportunity to ‘pop between offices’ will extend to the successful candidate, given that the published grading appears to place the role several levels below the CNO and CMO in a system where hierarchy matters.
Still, the establishment of the role is significant. A CPO has the potential to support the profession’s contribution
to national health policy, patient care and system reform. It is in everyone’s interests (the profession’s, society’s, patients’ and the health system’s) for the new CPO to be successful.
The sense of momentum is not confined to formal platforms. Over recent months, I have been struck by the energy, enthusiasm and ambition for development and innovation across Irish pharmacy. I see it in community pharmacy, hospital pharmacy, industry, regulation and education. I see it among young graduates, in conversations with colleagues from other health professions, and in the growing admiration that international colleagues express for Irish pharmacy practice. It may not always feel sunny from inside the profession, but from the outside, Irish pharmacy is beginning to look impressive.
That same message was evident at UCC during Prof Laura Sahm’s presentation at the recent International Social Pharmacy Workshop (ISPW) in Cork. She described the work achieved by the Irish pharmacy profession in recent years: The recommendations of the Expert Task Force, the provisions of the Community Contractor Agreement 2025, pharmacists’ roles in vaccination, the Common Conditions Service, plans for pharmacist prescribing, and developments in hospital, industrial and specialist pharmacy practice. It was difficult not to feel proud of what the Irish profession has achieved. ISPW felt like a rare sunny spell where many parts of the profession were feeling the warmth of the sun.
The progress being described belongs to the whole profession. It belongs to pharmacists who vaccinated patients through winter pressures. It belongs to those delivering new services while managing queues, stock shortages, staffing pressures and patient needs. It belongs to those developing hospital specialisms, advancing industrial practice, supporting regulation, teaching students and quietly holding standards in difficult places. The story of progress is not being written mainly in conference
The sense of momentum is not confined to formal platforms
rooms. It is being written in practice. I wish more pharmacists could have heard the conversations that emerged during the workshop I facilitated with Dr Mary Collins on Emotional Intelligence in Pharmacy. Participants spoke authentically about professional struggles and the aspects of Emotional Intelligence that help people navigate increasingly complex professional environments. I was touched, and a little shocked, by the number of conference attendees who later spoke quietly about workplace cultures and their impact on wellbeing.
I wish employers and managers could hear the impact that they and their behaviours can, often unwittingly, have on employees and workplace cultures.
I also wish employees could hear the impact that they and their behaviours can, often unwittingly, have on colleagues, employers and workplaces. There is work to do in this space. In my ISPW keynote, I positioned human wellbeing and emotional intelligence as essential operating systems for humans as we move further into a technology- enabled world. The ability to harness the combined power of AI and EI will be a key differentiator in future workplaces. At present, few workplaces seem to have fully harnessed either.
Unlike the Irish summer of 2026, there have been some rainclouds in my recent pharmacy sunshine. There have, in fact, been times when I was glad you were not there.
I was glad more pharmacists were not present when a Scandinavian attendee at ISPW described visiting a city-based community pharmacy in Dublin to ask about the Common Conditions Service. She reported that the pharmacist was dismissive of the service, stating that “nobody is using it” and that it was of little practical use to patients or pharmacists. My heart sank.
I do not doubt that the pharmacist may have spoken truthfully about their experience. Their local experience may well be genuine. Honest accounts of what is and is not working are essential if services are to improve. The difficulty is that, however unintentionally, those comments risked undermining wider efforts to communicate the profession’s progress. A single local perspective was placed, on an international stage, alongside accounts of national progress, and it risked weakening the story of what has been achieved.
This is not to suggest that criticism should be suppressed. A healthy profession must create space for honest disagreement, constructive challenge and critical reflection.
Those conversations are essential to progress. But they are most valuable when they contribute to collective learning rather than unintentionally obscuring the broader picture. They are most valuable when they contribute to a wider professional debate.
We still have a lot to learn, as a profession, about working together and supporting a longer-term profession- wide strategic direction. It takes many small steps to complete a longer journey to a worthwhile destination. It does not help that journey when individual steps are criticised without considering their role in the broader picture. In truth, none of us can yet know whether the Common Conditions Service is making a meaningful contribution to healthcare. Only time and well-structured retrospective analysis will be able to tell.
I am also very glad more pharmacists were not there when I read the recent advertisement for the role of CPO. If I were a more cynical person, I might have questioned the authenticity of the Minister and Chief Medical Officer’s declarations at the IPU conference. Fortunately, I am not cynical. However, the encouragement to IPU conference attendees to apply for the role sits uneasily alongside the eligibility criteria ultimately published. The contrast between the conference messaging and the published criteria is difficult to ignore and understandably creates confusion about the intended scope of the role.
That brings me to my final thundercloud: The absence of a professional body for Irish pharmacy to
It takes many small steps to complete a longer journey to a worthwhile destination
provide a professional perspective. This gap was highlighted during one of the ISPW sessions as an obvious feature of the Irish pharmacy landscape. I posed the question: What is stopping the pharmacy profession from self-organising around a professional agenda? There did not seem to be a clear answer.
Pharmacy is a profession. Pharmacists are professionals. Professional status is a societal privilege, and with such privilege comes societal responsibility.
If we take our professional standing seriously, as I believe we do, then we must self-organise to establish a professional voice that is distinct from the other voices on the landscape.
A professional voice exists not to negotiate, regulate, educate or employ pharmacists, but to articulate what the profession stands for, where it is going, and what responsibilities accompany professional status. A professional voice would enable Irish pharmacy
to speak coherently on matters affecting patients, practitioners and society, while complementing, not replacing, the essential roles of representative, regulatory, educational and commercial organisations.
We are fortunate to have strong voices in all those areas. Organisations such as the IPU, HPAI, PSI, universities, employers, special-interest groups and others each make vital contributions within their respective mandates and progress the professional agenda insofar as it aligns with their respective mandates. What Ireland lacks is a professional voice independent of any one organisation’s mandate: A forum for professional interaction, growth, support, development and strategic direction. A voice that can identify the emerging trends and ensure that all contributors to practice can recognise and understand our combined progress. Such a voice would help all parts of pharmacy, including a newly appointed CPO, to understand how the profession might align around a common purpose in service of patients and society.
Most importantly, such a voice would not belong only to those who attend conferences, sit on panels or speak from platforms. It would need to belong to the pharmacist reading this in a busy dispensary, the hospital pharmacist staying late to finish a ward issue, the industrial pharmacist advancing medicine development, the regulator trying to protect standards, the educator shaping future practitioners, and the young graduate wondering where they fit. A professional movement will only matter if it makes room for the people who are too busy to join the conversation, yet whose work gives the conversation its meaning.
Our Emotional Intelligence study may offer some insights into the journey towards cohesion. In the meantime, I will savour the sunny days of 2026 when I glimpsed Irish pharmacy at its finest. There may be storm clouds ahead on the journey towards an independent professional voice; that is inevitable when unstable weather must clear. But I look forward to the fine weather beyond.
On a lazy sunny day, I must admit… I wish we were already there.
Dr Catriona Bradley is a pharmacist and psychologist and former Executive Director of the Irish Institute of Pharmacy. She’s particularly interested in exploring psychology in pharmacy and always welcomes pharmacists’ views & comments in this area at catriona1.bradley@gmail.com.
