The General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) has elected six new council members for 2026 and 2027.
It said the council is responsible for “setting the organisation’s strategic direction, ensuring it operates effectively and efficiently”.
It also upholds the GPhC’s “statutory role to protect, promote and maintain the health, safety and wellbeing of patients and the public”.
New members
The council is chosen by the Privy Council and features “a balance of registrant and lay perspectives to inform decision-making”.
The new members are Anita Charlesworth, Sheila Kumar, Professor Christopher Langley, Liz Fidler, Ben Hannan and Claire Dearden.
Anita Charlesworth is a health economist and the only person added to the council in 2026 as a lay member.
She is a non-executive director of West North London Integrated Care Board (ICB) and is a co-chair of the NHS Productivity Commission for the Health Foundation.
Taking office in 2027, also as a lay member, is Sheila Kumar. She is the senior independent director and chair of the Remuneration and People Committee and an independent non-executive director on the Board of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.
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Professor Christopher Langley will be a pharmacist member. He is an academic pharmacist and a professor of Pharmacy Law and Practice at Aston University, and head of the university’s Pharmacy School.
He is a chair of the Accreditation Panel at the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland and a governor at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.
Liz Fidler is a pharmacy technician member and is a senior professional advisor within the chief pharmaceutical officer’s department at NHS England.
Claire Dearden is also a pharmacy technician, and is the medicines optimisation governance and service improvement lead at the Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent ICB.
Diverse skills
Pharmacist member Ben Hannan is the director of service transformation, planning and performance at NHS Lanarkshire and was a founding fellow of the Royal College of Pharmacy.
GPhC chair Gisela Abbam said “it is vital that our Council reflects a diverse range of skills, experience and perspectives so we can make well-informed decisions in the public interest”.
“I am delighted to welcome Anita to the Council and look forward to welcoming Sheila, Christopher, Liz, Ben and Claire next year,” she added, “I look forward to working with our new members to deliver safe, effective and inclusive pharmacy regulation for patients and the public.”
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It follows the GPhC revealing earlier this month that the body receives “more than 9,500 fitness-to-practise (FtP) concerns in a year”.
Its chief executive Kathie Cashell spoke at the Clinical Pharmacy Congress on May 8, and said there was a “77% increase in concerns since 2023/24” but that the “vast majority” are then “resolved or signposted appropriately at the very beginning of the process”.
Pharmacy bodies have also expressed varied reactions to the GPhC’s draft supervision standards, with the National Pharmacy Association (NPA), Royal College of Pharmacy (RCPharm), the Company Chemists’ Association (CCA) and the Pharmacists’ Defence Association (PDA) all weighing in.
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RCPharm called for “greater clarity” on the standards, the NPA warned that increasing absence periods could “lead to remote supervision” and the PDA said that the standards could lead to “blurring statutory roles, weakening accountability and enabling unsafe models of practice”.
The CCA conversely argued that the “safe and effective running of a pharmacy should not be dependent on the physical presence of a responsible pharmacist (RP)”.
