Four new faces have joined the national pharmacy boards for England, Wales and Scotland following three weeks of elections, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society announced today (June 7).

Mahendra Patel, Anthony Cox, Kim Munro and Jodie Williamson will be joined by five re-elected members, following annual elections for a third of the total number of seats for each national board.

Dr Patel, pharmacist and senior lecturer at the University of Huddersfield, who was elected to the only academic seat on the English pharmacy board, said it was a challenging time for community pharmacy and was exciting to be on the board.

"We need to get our hands dirty. The challenging part is to reach the community practitioners that [are] the core of pharmacy and engage that group" Mahendra Patel English national pharmacy board	More on the RPS RPS says faculty will boost pharmacy's credibility RPS warns pharmacists on anonymity and how to       act online RPS: all long-term patients deserve an NMS MORE NEWS
	"We need to get our hands dirty. The challenging part is to reach the community practitioners that [are] the core of pharmacy and engage that group," he told C+D. University of Birmingham lecturer in clinical pharmacy Anthony Cox said it was "very humbling" to be elected to one of the any-sector seats on the English board.

Dr Cox would use his position to call for evidence to show that increasing pressures in the workplace could have a negative impact on the professionalism of pharmacists, he told C+D.

Re-elected to the English board were community pharmacists David Carter from South Shields – who promised to focus on swelling student numbers – and Sharon Buckle from Nottingham, who pledged to campaign for the decriminalisation of dispensing errors.

Hospital pharmacy representative Tony West retained his hospital pharmacy seat after running unopposed in the elections.

In Scotland, re-elected board members Jonathan Burton and John McAnaw were joined by Kim Munro. In Wales, Phillip Parry and Gareth Holyfield were re-elected and joined by Jodie Williamson.

The new board members will take office on June 26 in England, on June 24 in Wales and July 2 in Scotland. The chairs and vice chairs for each board will be elected when the boards next meet.

Each year, roughly a third of the members of each national pharmacy board must stand for election.