FIP President Mr Paul Sinclair AM will discuss the role of innovation, technology, and pharmaceutical science in addressing global healthcare challenges. FIP’s vision is a world where everyone has access to safe, affordable, and effective medicines. While scientific advances are creating unprecedented opportunities, inequitable access, affordability, and workforce knowledge gaps remain significant barriers.
Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs) illustrate these challenges. As a rapidly evolving therapeutic field, ATMPs are transforming pharmacology and medicines development. ATMPs are highly complex therapies requiring robust systems to ensure safety, quality, traceability, and optimal patient outcomes. Pharmacists play a critical role across the entire pathway, from procurement and storage to preparation, dispensing, and administration, while ensuring regulatory compliance.
However, ATMPs are increasingly moving beyond specialist hospital settings into primary care. As community pharmacies become key access points for these therapies, workforce development must extend beyond hospital practice. Although foundational science is increasingly included in undergraduate pharmacy curricula, much of the existing workforce lacks access to continuing professional development (CPD) needed to keep pace with advances in molecular science.
Limiting education to specialist settings risks widening inequities and constraining the broader vision of accessible pharmaceutical care. Recognising this need, the European Association of Hospital Pharmacists has called for the rapid development of education and training programmes to build competencies across the full spectrum of ATMPs. Understanding the types and levels of CPD required is essential to maintaining workforce competence.
Using ATMPs as one example of emerging innovation, this presentation will explore the education and training needs of the global pharmacy workforce and consider implications for curricula, CPD, and professional development. Building pharmacists’ capabilities in advanced therapies and medication management is essential to strengthening multidisciplinary care and preparing a future-ready workforce. A coordinated systems approach can help translate scientific innovation into equitable patient access through community pharmacy, supporting universal health coverage and advancing FIP’s global vision.