EAHP’s 24th Congress – Putting personalised medicine front and centre to better address patient needs

Over the past 3 days, more than 3700 hospital pharmacists from over 60 different countries met in Barcelona, Spain for the annual congress of the European Association of Hospital Pharmacists (EAHP).  The Scientific Programme centred this year around the theme “Personalised Hospital Pharmacy – meeting the needs of every patient”. On each of the 3 fully packed days, congress attendees had the possibility to attend a number of seminars, workshops and Synergy Satellites. The latter addressed developments in the field of biosimilars, anticoagulation as well as the Falsified Medicines Directive (FMD) and Brexit. Keynotes were delivered on the topic of OMICS, clinical human factors and health inequalities.

EAHP’s Statement Implementation team welcomed numerous individuals to talk about the European Statements of Hospital Pharmacy, the self-assessment tool as well as the Statement Implementation Learning Collaborative Centres (SILCC) programme. In addition, the team shared information published in EAHP’s 2018 Medicines Shortages Report which outlines the seriousness of the growing problem of medicines shortages in the hospital sector. EAHP's poster walk, a unique Congress feature, brought together participants and poster authors to discuss the latest research innovations. The Scientific Committee awarded the 1st prize for poster submissions to Meshal Alshakrah for the abstract and poster titled ‘Determining the necessary components of a pharmaceutical care complexity screening tool: an e-delphi study'. The 2019 Good Practice Initiative (GIP) award went to Charlotte Olesen for her work on "Using an electronic algorithm to identify the most relevant patients for medication review". EAHP would like to thank its Platinum Partners, Amgen and Bayer, its Gold Partner, Pfizer and its Corporate Partners, Omnicell and MSD, for their support. EAHP is already looking forward to celebrating the 25th anniversary of its congress in 2020. For this occasion the Association will be returning to Gothenburg, Sweden from 25th to 27th March 2020.