The London 2012 Olympic games have set a new benchmark for medical service provision at the games, LOCOG's pharmacy clinical lead Mark Stuart has told C+D.

During the games, about 100 qualified volunteers worked to provide a variety of pharmacy services to both athletes and spectators, with operations being co-ordinated from the Olympic Park's polyclinic in Stratford.

Volunteers were responsible for distributing medicines across all 35 competition venues as well as dealing with medicine queries.

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	The team's performance had been "amazing" said Mr Stuart, who has previously worked on pharmacy operations at other events including the Olympics in Beijing, Athens and Sydney. "I'm extremely happy with what we've achieved over the past few weeks. We've been planning this for almost four years and I feel like it has paid off," Mr Stuart said.

"We had an amazing team across all the sites during the games," he added, citing clinical skills as a particular strength of many of the volunteers.

More than 1,400 people had applied to be a member of London 2012's pharmacy team but only 100 were lucky enough to be selected, he said.

"We processed every application individually and I believe the team we selected really did represent the best members of UK pharmacy," said Mr Stuart.

Pharmacists volunteering at the games had successfully answered lots of questions about international drugs and their UK equivalents, Mr Stuart said.

"Some of the other challenges for us pharmacists were communicating in different languages and we had a comprehensive interpreter service, which we tapped into quite often," explained Mr Stuart.