Developed by Belfast Healthy Cities in partnership with the Department of Health, the Pharmacy Schools Programme is a new resource that teaches school children about the role of community pharmacies and the health support they provide.
This new interactive resource aims to promote self-care and raise awareness of medication safety with school children. It also aims to highlight the role of community pharmacy services to treat minor childhood ailments such as colds, head lice and hay fever. The resource follows a health literacy approach and was developed and piloted with primary schools in Belfast.
Primary schools across Northern Ireland can avail of the programme, with the resources provided for Primary 1 – Primary 7. The dedicated teaching resource includes lesson plans to support delivery of the Northern Ireland Curriculum and has been co-produced with a range of organisations across pharmacy, education, health, academia and community and voluntary sectors.
The Pharmacy Schools Programme was also developed to support the delivery of the Medicines Optimisation Quality Framework and Transforming medication safety in Northern Ireland strategy which aims to reduce severe avoidable harm from the use of medicines.
Pharmacy Futures NI school resources
The Pharmacy Schools Programme complements the following school resources that have been developed under the Pharmacy Futures NI campaign:
Pharmacy Futures NI aims to address the significant gap in the availability of qualified pharmacy professionals in NI and fill 1,100+ additional roles in pharmacy sector in NI over the next four years.