Why I created Medicine in Practice

Every week, somewhere in the UK, a pharmacist or pharmacy technician starts a new primary care role, opens a full clinic list, and realises that nobody nearby has time to talk through the difficult decisions. I created Medicine in Practice because too many pharmacy professionals are placed into complex primary care roles and expected to manage difficult clinical decisions with very limited ongoing support. Formal qualifications are important, but they do not replace access to experienced clinical supervision, real case discussion and practical guidance.

This post is the story and values behind the platform. It is general guidance to support your practice: always individualise decisions for the patient in front of you and follow your local guidance.

What limited support looks like day to day

It rarely looks dramatic. It looks like a medication review where you are fairly sure of the plan but have nobody to check it with. A discharge letter with a change you do not quite trust, and a GP who is triple-booked. A question swallowed because everyone around you is busy and you do not want to seem out of your depth. So you search, you decide as safely as you can, and you carry the doubt home.

None of that means the employer is careless or the clinician is weak. It is what happens when demand for pharmacy professionals in general practice grows faster than the supervision structures around them, and it lands hardest on the newest.

Learn the job by doing the job

The alternative is simple to say and hard to build: practise the actual work before it counts. Medicine in Practice is built around realistic, fully fictional patients. You work through the case as you would in clinic: read the record, spot the risks, decide what you would do, write it up. Then you get an honest verdict on your decision: good, missed or unsafe, with the reasoning spelled out.

Watching a webinar tells you what someone else knows. A verdict on your own decision tells you what you would actually have done, which is the only thing a patient ever experiences. Learn the job by doing the job.

Make the mistakes here, not on a patient

Everyone in clinical work learns from mistakes. The only question is where those mistakes happen. On our fictional patients, an unsafe call costs you nothing except a slightly bruised ego and a clear explanation of what you missed. In clinic, the same call can cost a great deal more. Make the mistakes here, not on a patient. That line sits behind everything we build, and it is why the verdicts are blunt rather than flattering: a platform that always tells you everything is fine is keeping you comfortable, not safe.

Supervision and real case discussion, not content alone

Cases alone are not enough either, so the platform sits alongside human support: 1:1 mentoring and supervision with experienced primary care clinicians, and case-based teaching for whole teams. Talking through a real dilemma with someone who has managed hundreds like it is how judgement forms. We have written separately about clinical supervision for pharmacists in primary care.

Who it is for

Medicine in Practice is for pharmacists and pharmacy technicians working in, or moving into, primary care: the newly appointed practice pharmacist, the technician taking on more clinical work, the experienced community pharmacist making the switch. It is also for the practices and primary care networks that employ them, because a team that can see where its pharmacy staff are strong and where they need support can develop them deliberately.

Where we stand on accreditation

We are an independent training provider. Our levels and progression are based on our own competency framework, which we publish openly at /standards. We are not accredited, endorsed or approved by the GPhC or any other regulator, and nothing we issue is a licence, a qualification or a substitute for your employer's own governance.

We say that plainly because under-claiming is the honest position, and because the risk of implying otherwise is real: a pharmacy professional who believes a course has authorised them to work beyond their competence is exactly what this platform exists to prevent. Our promise is narrower: we will help you build and evidence genuine capability, and we will tell you the truth about where you are.

Start with an honest baseline

If any of this sounds like your working week, the simplest way to see whether we can help is the free 12-question baseline skills check. It takes a few minutes, uses the same fictional-patient style as the rest of the platform, and gives you a straight answer about where your strengths and gaps sit. No sales call, no obligation: just an honest starting point.