On Friday the 24th and Saturday 25th of September, the SurplusMed team attended the largest gathering for the clinical pharmacy profession in the United Kingdom, the Clinical Pharmacy Congress 2021!
We joined over 130 pharmaceutical suppliers, speakers and delegates to discuss the exciting future of pharmacy and to showcase innovative ways we can improve and deepen our understanding of pharmaceutical practices today. But most importantly, this great opportunity allowed us to finally demonstrate our new product in person!
SurplusMed has been designed, and tested by experienced NHS pharmacists and technicians, with the explicit purpose of providing a platform for verified pharmacy professionals to freely share excess stock within NHS trusts to reduce medication wastage.
Despite government-led climate change policies such as ‘The Greener NHS Adaptation Plan’ that is directly committed to lowering carbon emissions in order to achieve a more sustainable healthcare service, sustainability is still not on the list of priorities for NHS trusts – regardless of its considerable benefits. By emphasising that our platform would benefit our current environmental climate and allow more efficient management of resources within NHS trusts, we gained lots of support and positive feedback on the possibilities of our unique medication waste reduction platform.
There was an overwhelming consensus from these encounters that expressed two beliefs; Firstly, that medicines wastage is an urgent issue that should be addressed imminently, and secondly, that there were many people who conveyed that they were actively committed to reducing this.
Attending the CPC exhibition was an insightful experience for the entire team, and to our delight, SurplusMed was met with great interest by a diverse range of people in the world of pharmacy and pharmaceutical procurement.
Fortunately, we were able to take part as both exhibitors and speakers on both days, and because of this, we had very productive conversations with a number of healthcare professionals. Our own findings, entitled “The current state of drug wastage in the NHS” captured between February – March 2021 proved to be a staple piece of research, as many people were compelled to initiate change in their practices once becoming aware of the most up-to-date figures of the extent of medicines wastage that is currently happening today.
We are elated at the amount of enthusiasm shown for SurplusMed over the past few weeks and please look forward to further communication as we continue our mission to reduce medicines wastage and make medicines management and pharmaceutical procurement as smooth as possible!