Why you should stand: reflections from an elected RPS board member

“There is a lot of support between board members – current members really want to help new members to settle in as quickly as possible.”

Published: 30 January 2026

Sue Ladds

RPS English Pharmacy Board member

This blog was published when the organisation was the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.

Sue Ladds works for NHS England as national lead for hospital pharmacy, a role that involves supporting modernisation, transformation and improvement programmes. In 2024, she was elected to the English Pharmacy Board. She has 18 months left of her term so will be part of the first National English Pharmacy Advisory Council when the royal college launches later this year.

What were your reasons for standing to be an elected member?

I stood for professional and personal reasons.

Professionally, I wanted to make a difference. I’ve always worked in the NHS so it felt like a different way to influence things on a bigger scale. It was also a way to do something a bit different outside of the day job, to bring some more breadth to what I was doing. And it gives me more scope to get involved in other things. For example, a couple of months ago, I went to Portugal to speak at a hospitals conference, having been invited by a contact made through my work with the RPS. So it has brought some unexpected opportunities as well.

On a personal level, I was conscious of the opportunity to develop skills and contacts. I also wanted to gain some different experiences of working on a board, so it’s been good to see how meetings and decision-making works in another organisation.

What do you feel your biggest achievements have been so far as a board member?

The stand-out achievement for me has been making sure the RPS has aseptic and technical services as part of its strategy. This is an area I work on in my role with NHS England. It’s mainly concerned with large sterile laboratories where they prepare injections for chemotherapy and other treatments. It’s a slightly forgotten area of practice, but it’s very important. I was able to make sure it is part of RPS strategy and there is now a project reviewing the standard those services work to, which has definitely increased the profile of that area of work.

But for issues that are not your particular area of expertise, it is good just being able to chip in ideas. Everyone gets an opportunity to have their say, including on things that don’t relate to your day job. But we also look at big questions like assisted dying and those issues that don’t come into people’s day jobs but are important.

What’s good is the variety of areas of practice that are present in the English board. It brings an array of perspectives to the topics we discuss. It makes for a very rich conversation — even if we don’t always agree, hopefully it means we don’t miss anything, and I feel that we have reached better positions for having a broad range of views at the table.

What was your experience of joining as a new board member?

I know that training for new members is a priority, with induction days being put in place for new Council members. I was already quite used to a board meeting environment when I started, which maybe made things a bit easier for me. If you’re not familiar with that type of working then I would say it takes a bit of getting used to — there’s quite a lot of process to learn that you might not know about when you start, and there are particular ways of doing things. But I found that people were very keen to offer support and mentoring. There is a lot of support between board members — current members really want to help new members to settle in as quickly as possible.

What changes are you anticipating as we move to become national advisory councils?

Obviously we’ll have some different people, and we’ll spend some time getting to know each other. In general I think being on a national board and then moving to the new councils will be fairly similar as the remits are quite closely matched. But, we will have a whole new agenda to consider – like how will the national council support the implementation of the strategy of the Royal College of Pharmacy? It’s also an opportunity to find the best ways forward, and maybe refresh some things that haven’t worked so well in the past. It’s an exciting time.

What is your advice for anyone thinking about standing?

I would say to read everything and make sure you know what’s involved in the role and what isn’t. It’s important to make sure this is clear as you don’t want to go in with a false impression of what you’ll be doing.

But I would also say go for it and see what happens! Putting yourself forward, putting yourself out there, does take a bit of bravery, but nobody will think any less of you for doing it, and only positive things can come from it whether you are elected or not.

This blog was published when the organisation was the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. The Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) has been out and about across GB over the past six weeks, hosting a series of 15 in-person ‘roadshow’ events for pharmacists and pharmaceutical scientists (whether members or not). We held our final week of roadshow events in Cambridge, Bristol and Nottingham, marking the end of a few weeks of travel and great discussions. These events, and some supporting webinars, have outlined our proposals for change and our ambitions to become a royal college and have been a great opportunity to hear the initial views of those working in pharmacy, on the proposals and more broadly the future of the pharmacy ecosystem. Having participated in all but one of the events, I’ve enjoyed the evolution of our presentation as we heard the feedback from participants, saw what resonated, and understood where we needed to add clarity to the proposals. It also means that some who attended the earlier sessions will have seen slightly different versions of our presentations, and so we have more to do, later this year and early next year to continue to explain what our proposals mean. Though we started each event with a fairly detailed presentation from RPS, we heard that there are those who are looking forward to seeing the line-by-line changes we are proposing for our Royal Charter: this will be set out next year once we’ve taken on board all of the feedback and finalised the proposals. Whilst the presentation was necessary, so those attending could understand our proposals and the context in which we were making them, by far the most valuable part was the Q&A, where we were joined by many of RPS’s Board and Assembly members. It was great to have our Assembly and Board members blending their personal professional viewpoint and support for the change proposals, really bringing things to life in a meaningful way. And of course, the opportunity to listen to what mattered to pharmacists and pharmaceutical scientists, both generally and in relation to our proposals to become a royal college, was the purpose of the exercise. The questions people asked, and the discussions that took place during the events (and often for a good while afterwards) have provided real insight that we are committed to actioning. We’re in the process of summarising the roadshow experience, theming the questions we received and taking on board the feedback to ensure our responses and explanations are clear and address the issues raised. This will form the basis of a report that we will share with those who attended, with RPS members and with the wider pharmacy community. I don’t want to preempt the report, but I would like to share a few early reflections from my personal experience of the last few weeks. Firstly, I want to say a big thank you to everyone who chose to give up a weekend morning or an evening to come to talk with us. Almost 1,000 people registered to attend across all of the events, and most events were attended by the majority of those who registered (plus a few who hadn’t and who were also welcomed!). It was great to see people from a wide range of professional settings; from community, hospital, primary, industry and academia (including some old friends from my hospital pharmacy days) and an array of people representing different specialisms and career stages. I was particularly struck by a number of early career, foundation trainees and pharmacy students who attended — the thoughtfulness in their questions and their passion for their chosen profession was notable — they inspired me to continue to advocate for these changes and provided the motivation to get out there and deliver another roadshow event when a cup of tea and a good book were beckoning. If they are any measure of our future workforce the profession will be in safe hands and we owe them our best efforts to deliver the royal college change that I believe will help elevate the profession and their professional futures. A major theme from the conversations was credentialing, which I believe is an important part of our vision for the future of the profession and something we’ve invested a lot of time into developing over the last 4 to 5 years. I am heartened by the level of interest in credentialing, as at its core it is about assuring patient safety, and the questions show that we still have a lot of work to do, explaining it and its value across all patient-focused roles. I am keen to further explore how we can best support those undertaking their credentialing journey. It was hugely valuable to discuss the challenges with pharmacists working in a variety of settings and to hear from employers about their experiences and perceptions and what they need from credentialing. If I’m honest, I didn’t know exactly what to expect from a workforce under so much pressure at the moment and so was delighted by the general level of warmth for our proposals and the recognition of what it could mean for pharmacy. This quickly led on to questions about what came after the royal college proposal and how this aligned with our commitment to improving as an organisation and delivering value for our members. We hear the call for improvements to our in-person and online engagement strongly and our plans for a digital transformation will be fundamental to delivering on this and an improvement for our members, which are the focus of two other programmes the RPS has been working on and which we will bring to life more next year. Whilst our focus right now is on the significant change in the way that we are structured and governed, which is primarily focused on enhancing our role as the professional leadership body for pharmacy, for me this is inseparable from our member services. I see professional leadership and membership as two sides of the same coin, and by strengthening one area we also add to the vitality of the other. This illustrates that there’s a lot on the horizon for the RPS (hopefully the future Royal College of Pharmacy). We have many issues to tackle. Not all of them will be straightforward and many of them will need us to collaborate more effectively and more openly with others in pharmacy and healthcare. If our proposals are accepted there will be a lot of complex internal work required to bring them to life and it’s important that we do not lose sight of the needs of the profession as we make these changes. But the fact that so many people turned out to discuss them reinforces in me the sense that a lot of pharmacists are rooting for these changes and willing us on to be successful to the benefit of the profession, patients and the public. It’s therefore critical all round that we continue to listen and communicate about our activities. This brings me back to the report on the roadshows that I mentioned at the start. The report will present the conversations at the roadshows in the round, for the benefit of everyone who attended – and I hope for many more who were not able to come. That report will appear next month and I urge everyone to have a read. The questions raised by attendees will, I am sure be relevant for many others, and the report is our chance to make sure our answers are clear and available to everyone. Thereafter we will be continuing to make our proposals for change clear and accessible, encouraging our members to vote and then continuing to be a more communicative organisation as we pursue our journey towards becoming more effective as a voice for pharmacy, and in so doing, serve patients, our members and the wider community better. Read RPS President Claire Anderson's reflections on our roadshows. Read more about our proposals for change.