Former Lloydspharmacy superintendent Victoria Steele yesterday (July 2) announced that she will leave Lloydspharmacy Healthcare Services and the wider Hallo Healthcare Group (HHG) “this summer”.

Steele leaves her clinical director and chief pharmacist role for Lloydspharmacy Healthcare Services after 13 years working at HHG but just eight months in her current position.

Read more: Ex-Lloydspharmacy superintendent Victoria Steele lands new role in group

Her move to the business, which operates in NHS hospitals, prisons, community health trusts and the private sector, came after sister company Lloydspharmacy wrapped up its community pharmacy operations in November.

She had held the role at the pharmacy giant since 2020, becoming its first female superintendent, navigating it through the COVID-19 pandemic and overseeing its exit from the high street at a time when it was the country’s second-largest community pharmacy multiple.

 

“Champion for patient safety”

 

Steele told C+D that she will support the transition throughout this month as her deputy chief pharmacist Adam Neilson takes up the superintendent pharmacist role for Lloydspharmacy Healthcare Services once she leaves.

She added that she was “grateful for the internal and external support” throughout her career at HHG but that it was time to “explore new opportunities” and focus on her “ability to inspire and develop the next generation of healthcare professionals”.

Read more: Lloydspharmacy confirms 'successful sale' of all community pharmacies

Lloydspharmacy Healthcare Services said that Steele, who was a founding member of the Community Pharmacy Patient Safety Group and chaired it from 2021 to 2023, is a “champion for patient safety and care”.

She is “renowned for her passion and belief in ensuring patients get great healthcare closer to their home”, it added.

It thanked her for “her service to patients, pharmacists and community healthcare alike and [wished] her well in the next chapter”.

 

Lloydspharmacy latest

 

Since Lloydspharmacy confirmed that it had exited the high street for good in November, HHG now controls four healthcare-related entities:

• Lloydspharmacy Healthcare Services, (trading as LP HCS Ltd), which operates in NHS hospitals, prisons, community health trusts and in the private sector
• Lloydspharmacy Clinical Homecare, which provides home healthcare services
• Lloydspharmacy Online Doctor
• AAH, a pharmaceutical wholesaler and distributor

But despite leaving the community pharmacy sector, Lloydspharmacy has remained prominently in the news cycle.

In May, a former Lloydspharmacy store manager won nearly £9,000 in a payout over her dismissal from the multiple.

Read more: Pharmacy technician wins £9k payout over Lloydspharmacy dismissal

And in April, a Jhoots branch became the third premises to be repossessed by bailiffs in connection to Lloydspharmacy’s liquidation - just two months after another pharmacy repossession landed a patient in hospital.

It followed the news that a former landlord owed £452,000 in outstanding rent by the head office of Lloydspharmacy’s holding company had raised concerns about its liquidators’ “conflicts of interest” and called for its former owner to face scrutiny.

Meanwhile, former Sainsbury’s workers involved in a legal dispute over the “loss of their enhanced redundancy entitlement” from the Lloydspharmacy estate will have their case heard in March next year.