There is a quiet anxiety moving through community pharmacy right now. You hear it in conference corridors, in WhatsApp groups, in the half-jokes colleagues make after closing time.
It sounds like this. Have I left it too late?
By August, the first cohort of newly qualified pharmacists will join the register as independent prescribers from day one. The conversation in our sector has shifted accordingly. And experienced pharmacists, some of whom who have served their communities faithfully for ten, twenty or thirty years are quietly wondering whether the profession is moving on without them.
I understand that question. I’ve asked it of myself.
My journey into independent prescribing did not happen early. It happened later than most. But I have come to believe something I want to offer to anyone reading this, later does not mean too late. The years that looked like nothing were in fact the preparation.
Read more: IP pathfinder programme ‘saved’ pharmacists from leaving sector
Long before I held a prescription pad, I was building foundations. In 2017, I completed the Mary Seacole Leadership Programme, which changed how I understood healthcare systems and my place within them. I then went on to the postgraduate diploma in clinical pharmacy practice at Bath, deepening my clinical grounding in long-term conditions, evidence-based practice, and reflective decision-making.
At the time, I did not know I was preparing. Looking back, I can see that I was preparing, quietly and deliberately, in the only way I knew how.
These were not detours. They were the slow architecture of becoming.
Read more: Gaps in supervision and training could ‘undermine’ IPs, trust warns
When I came to independent prescribing, I was fortunate. My designated prescribing practitioner was a GP colleague who had worked alongside me for 28 years. He knew my clinical judgement, my limits, my values.
But I am clear-eyed about this. A 28-year working relationship is not a strategy. It is a privilege.
Complicated
The single biggest barrier to independent prescribing in community pharmacy is not clinical capability, it is trouble accessing a designated prescribing practitioner willing to take you on.
Until we name that honestly as a sector, we will keep losing motivated pharmacists at the same gate.
Read more: DPP shortage: Crunch talks generate positive engagement, say RPS and NPA
For those starting cold, pathways do exist. Paid DPP schemes, PCN-based supervision, RPS Faculty mentoring, university-brokered placements. None are perfect. All are possible. Start there, not at the qualification.
Independent prescribing did not make me a different clinician. It gave me the tools to practise more fully as the clinician I had always been.
In my weight management clinic, I see this every week. A patient on tirzepatide is rarely just a weight-loss patient. They may be navigating perimenopause, a complicated relationship with food, decades of being weighed and judged, but never asked who she was. The prescription is the smallest part of that consultation.
The clinical autonomy is what matters - the freedom to titrate, to pause, to deprescribe when the person in front of me needs something different from the protocol on the page.
I will say this honestly. The first prescription I signed in my own name, my hand was not entirely steady. Anyone who tells you otherwise is performing.
Read more: Sector ‘not ready’ for IP revolution, IPA board member warns
I trace much of how I prescribe back to a much earlier consultation room.
One I sat in as a child, translating for my mother. She spoke Punjabi beautifully, the language of her love, her prayers, our home. But the healthcare system did not know how to meet her where she was. So I sat between clinician and patient, carrying conversations whose weight I would only understand decades later.
That experience never left me. It taught me that communication is clinical care. That health literacy is a system problem, not a patient problem. And that the most consequential moments in medicine are often the ones where someone finally feels seen.
Independent prescribing is what allowed me to act on this with the authority it always deserved.
So to the pharmacist reading this and wondering whether the moment has passed, it has not. You are not behind. You are becoming. And the timing that feels late is often the timing of someone finally ready to walk towards what they were always going to do.
Sukhi Basra is vice chair of the National Pharmacy Association