August 30, 2018, by Editor

‘Pharm-ing’ an international landscape at the 1st International Conference FIP Pharmacy Practice Research

1^st International Conference FIP Pharmacy Practice Research: Postgraduate students, Postdoctoral fellows, and supervisors’ symposium in Lisbon, Portugal.

This blog was written by Funmi Agbesanwa (2^nd year PhD) and Yasmin Karsan (3^rd year PhD), both from the division of Pharmacy Practice and Policy.

Our take on the conference

The International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP) pharmacy practice conference invited academics, fellows and students into a shared space to discuss subjects revolving around pharmacy practice. The conference was held in June 2018 at the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Lisbon. Delegates attended from across the world including Canada, Denmark and Australia.

The conference had a packed timetable including networking, workshops and lectures. It started with a few sessions of “3 Minute Thesis”. This allowed the audience to gain a brief insight into various pharmacy practice studies across the world – our very own Lydia Tutt presented her work on developing breast cancer services.

An engaging workshop which we attended focussed on “Research methodology for the implementation of Professional Services”. It enabled delegates to follow the journey of the implementation process alongside leading academics within the field. It brought to light alternative methods from varying practices such as “social network analysis” commonly used in engineering to pharmacy practice. The workshop allowed researchers to share their work and critically analyse various research methods when implementing services.

 

Research presentations were commonly featured throughout the conference, these involved topics comprising of “Network meta analysis”, “Mobile health interventions” and “Deprescribing”. Colleagues from the University of Alberta described the primary care landscape across Canada and the impact on community pharmacy services. Each day of the conference had networking opportunities over lunch and in coffee breaks, this gave an opportunity for more than the FIFA world cup to be discussed.

Academic posters were also presented and discussed during lunch breaks; Funmi Agbesanwa and Ify Ikhile (from our division) presented their PhD work through their posters. Posters were also presented by Claire Mann (postgraduate research fellow) and her 4^th year pharmacy undergraduate students (Katy and Hannah) on the national clinical pharmacists in General Practice evaluation.

We met a variety of colleagues from across the world; a few from University College London and the University of Technology Sydney who had posters on interesting qualitative work as well as colleagues from the Pharmaceutical Care Research Group, University of Basel who were also undertaking novel research on electronic dispending devices within patient settings.

Funmi’s perspective: the pharmacy museum

Aside from the conference, there was so much to do in Lisbon! Being pharmacists ourselves, we took the opportunity to visit the Pharmacy Museum in Lisbon. Here we explored the journey of pharmacy from the late fifteenth century to modern pharmacy as it is today. The museum also featured world pharmacy from across

different civilisations and cultures, exploring their key features and how they helped to shape pharmacy in modern day Portugal.

 

 

 

Yasmin’s perspective: pharmacy in Lisbon

Lisbon was great fun! As a 3^rd year pharmacy student who has just come back from maternity leave, I relished the fact that I was surrounded by fellow researchers. At first it was quite daunting to come back to work and continue my research. Being able to go to Lisbon and attend the conference helped me immerse myself back into research and refocus on my own work. Lisbon itself is a beautiful city with characteristic cobbled streets and within an hour’s train journey of a coastline of golden sand.

On one of the free days, I visited a friend in Lisbon who owns a chain of community pharmacies. He took me round to a few and we discussed the differences and similarities between the English and Portuguese model of community pharmacy. An interesting note was that they had two different types of community pharmacy; dispensing pharmacies (which deal with prescription only medicine and over the counter medicines) and over the counter only medicine pharmacies.

To conclude

The group outside Cais do Sodré station en route to Cascais

Needless to say, the conference itself provided a great opportunity to engage with other pharmacy practice researchers from across the world whilst allowing us to further reflect on our own research.

We were also able to explore different pockets of Lisbon such as the district of Alfama on the way to the Castillo de San Jorge and took a turbulent ride in a tuk tuk to the town of Belém where we gorged in too many pastéis de nata (Portuguese custard tarts)!

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