Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine

The Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine is a Faculty of the three Royal Colleges of Physicians of the United Kingdom (the Royal College of Physicians London, the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow). It is a UK-based professional membership organisation with over 1,500 members; physicians with a professional interest in the speciality of pharmaceutical medicine, the science of discovering, developing and testing new drugs, their regulation, and monitoring them for safety both during development and when they are prescribed. The Faculty is a registered charity and ultimately exists to bring about an improvement in health in patients and the general population.

The current President of the Faculty is Professor Alan Boyd.

In 1976 the three Royal Colleges of Physicians of the UK agreed to grant the first Diploma in Pharmaceutical Medicine to be gained by examination, and a two-year training course for pharmaceutical physicians was established under the guidance of the Joint Advisory Committee on pharmaceutical medicine, with representation from AMAPI (now the British Association of Pharmaceutical Physicians (BrAPP)), and the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI).

The rapid evolution of pharmaceutical specialists, and the developing interface between pharmaceutical medicine and other medical disciplines, led to the idea of creating a Faculty within the three Royal Colleges of Physicians, so that criteria could be established that would result in specialist accreditation. Thus, the Faculty was formed on 26 October 1989, led by its first President, Professor Sir Abraham Goldberg.

In April 2002, pharmaceutical medicine was officially recognised as a medical specialty in the UK and the GMC guidelines on Pharmaceutical Medicine stipulate the professional expectations of pharmaceutical physicians. In 2009 the Faculty formed part of the working party that developed the landmark RCP report Innovating for Health: Patients, Physicians, the Pharmaceutical Industry and the NHS.

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