Pharmaceutical Society of Northern Ireland

Hello and welcome to the last in a series of podcasts that mark the centenary of the Pharmaceutical Society NI.

We are the regulator of all pharmacists and pharmacy premises in Northern Ireland and as we turned 100 last year we recorded a series of conversations to celebrate the contribution that the profession has made to healthcare here.

In this final episode, we brought together two children of pharmacy who have each separately dedicated their spare time to researching the history of the profession in Britain and Ireland.

He is an accredited and experienced silversmith, local history tour guide and has just started working as a wedding celebrant.

His grandmother, grandfather, father and aunt were all community pharmacists.

He has curated a collection of documents and artefacts from his family history, a selection of which were displayed in Society House during the height of our celebrations last November.

He has also written extensively about the careers and personal histories of his pharmacist ancestors, especially about his grandmother Rose and grandfather James, who met while studying pharmacy in Dublin at the start of the 20th century, before moving to James' hometown of Ballycastle in the early 1910s to establish the pharmacy practice that would eventually be taken over by Aidan's father, also James, and Aunt Eileen in the 1940s.

Aidan also volunteers with Ballycastle Museum.

So all the schools of pharmacy in Ireland were together.

And to see new pharmacy graduates having qualified in Northern Ireland and on the register now for in the Pharmaceutical Society of Northern Ireland and the General Pharmaceutical Council.

qualifying as independent autonomous prescribers from the moment that they go on the register.

I mean, we're a journey away from that, but it's exciting to see that those pharmacists will be able to use their medicines expertise as well as the other skills that they're developing.