The pharmacy regulator’s council and executive members “have formed a new working group of ‘anti-racism champions’ to provide visible and vocal leadership internally and externally”, it yesterday (September 4) announced.
The seven “champions” will support the GPhC’s “anti-racism agenda”, help deliver its “commitments in this area” and provide “leadership on anti-racism”, it said.
The GPhC revealed that group members include Ade Williams, superintendent pharmacist and director of M J Williams Pharmacy and lead pharmacist at Bedminster Pharmacy in Bristol, and Ann Jacklin, another “pharmacist member of council”, as well as council chair Gisela Abbam.
Read more: GPhC to hold ‘confidential’ discussions on racism, registration and FtP suicides
“The group includes people with lived experience and allies who will help shape future action,” it added.
“The new group will help us drive forward our commitments in this area, holding ourselves to the same high standards we expect of others,” it said.
“We know from our discussions and engagement work that pharmacy professionals continue to experience discrimination and racism in practice and throughout their careers, even at the most senior levels,” the GPhC added.
“We should all be determined to change this,” it said.
Confidential sessions
The new group of “anti-racism champions” comes after the “council discussed the next steps on [its] racism in pharmacy work” in July, it said.
That month, council papers revealed that “racism in pharmacy” would be the topic of a “confidential” session.
Read more: ‘Incredible waste of talent’: PDA slams GPhC for ‘failing’ black students
At the time, it remained unclear what exactly would be under discussion in the meeting.
The council is set to discuss its wider equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) work in a “public session in September, with an update on all of the activity completed in 2023/24 – year two – of our strategy”, the GPhC yesterday revealed.
GPhC “failed” black students
It comes after the Pharmacists’ Defence Association (PDA) criticised the regulator for failing to address the registration attainment gap between black students and other groups in July.
“It is unclear what steps the GPhC has taken to independently assess any potential bias in its own registration exam nor what steps it has taken to support black African students,” it said at the time.
The PDA added that the persistent attainment gap between black students and other groups is “an incredible waste of talent and commitment when diligent students appear to be failed by a regulator that seems unable to ensure that individual universities provide better support”.
Read more: More than half of pharmacy teams ‘felt unsafe’ due to racist riots
In October, the GPhC found that white pharmacists were under-represented in the fitness-to-practise (FtP) concerns it received in 2021/22.
Meanwhile, the racist riots that took place across England last month led to “over half” of pharmacy teams feeling unsafe at work.
Some 13% of pharmacy teams “faced racist comments over [one] week”, National Pharmacy Association (NPA) survey data found.
