The Community Pharmacy Section (CPS) is the largest of the FIP sections, with 1317 members as per 1^st February 2013. The activities decided by the Executive Committee and the Steering Committee are implemented by the Section as well as by the “Foundation for Continuing Education Activities of the Section for Community Pharmacists of FIP”, founded in 1987.

Mission

The CPS mission is to assist pharmacists, wherever they live and practice, in the delivering of medicines, health products and services that will improve medicine use and advance patient care.

Activities in 2012 - 2013

The CPS organized a whole week Congress program, which was specifically tailored for community pharmacists, researchers in pharmacy practice, and leaders in pharmacy associations. At the Centennial, CPS organized or co-organized 8 sessions, whose content was aligned with the overall congress topic. For a number of years, the Community Pharmacy Section has also organized a breakfast session at the annual FIP Congress to highlight the activities of pharmacists above and beyond their core responsibilities and activities. In 2012, Ulrich Brunner from Germany presented “The Pharmacist as an actor in emergency programs and long term development projects – challenges and chances“, along with Eiko Kobayashi from Japan highlighting her activities in “The Role of the Disaster Relief Pharmacist“ with the Japanese Red Cross.

To mark the occasion of the FIP Centennial, the Community Pharmacy Section also took up the initiative to showcase 100 community pharmacists from around the world. The video can be accessed at http://www.fip.org/100talking. DVDs were also produced and distributed to pharmacy leaders.

In addition, we released our strategic document, Community Pharmacy Vision 2020, which you can also access at http://www.fip.org/CPSvision/. This document serves as a guiding platform to the Strategic Plan to be implemented in the coming years, and builds on the FIP document Vision 2020 and individual National Pharmaceutical Organisation documents.

The annual Steering Committee meeting of the Section was also held during the Congress, and we continued the tradition to organize a Poster Award, to encourage community pharmacy practice research and development.

As we are aware that not all our members can participate in the annual Congress, we want to foster our activities between Congresses. CPS now offers on-line continuing education on the web, and in 2012 CPS added a new resource on vaccinations and the role of the pharmacist.

To keep our members updated, we sent out our newsletter ZOOM 6 times per year. Also 6 times this year, we issued Professional News, in which members and non-members can follow the latest pharmacy practice discussions and research. From this year on, members can access previous years’ issues of ZOOM and Professional News on the dedicated section. We are also more present on Facebook, which now reaches more than 350 people.

To understand our members’ needs and collect suggestions for further development, CPS has conducted an online survey. Its results have resulted in the development of specific strategies to foster further individual involvement in the section and pursue the Sections’ mission.