Monday 11th May 2026 marked another important ‘first’ for the MyDispense UK and Ireland Community- our first ever in-person UK meeting! The event at Aston University in Birmingham brought together 44 attendees from 24 universities and health education organisations across the UK, Ireland and Australia.
The day’s programme covered:
- A preview of MyDispense version 8.1, which includes the new Community exercise type. Community exercises will eventually replace the Dispense and OTC exercises and will provide a much more realistic experience for students
- A hands-on session for creating Independent Prescribing exercises in version 8.0
- Upcoming priorities of pharmacy practice across the UK and Ireland, and how this affects future MyDispense development
- A group review on improving feedback to students
The meeting ended with a presentation from Aliyah Khalid covering her work with Natalie Lewis to generate AI prompt sets to allow users to generate prescription validation, over the counter (OTC), dispensing and electronic health record (EHR) exercise details using their locally available AI LLM platform.
With the day at a close, the attendees were treated to a showcase of Birmingham’s legendary Indian food scene with a fantastic meal at Asha’s.
Enormous thanks are due to Monash University for their generosity in providing the funding that allowed the day (and evening curry) to happen, to Keenan, Keith and Marian for making the lengthy journey to join us and to Natalie for graciously hosting us at Aston University. Given the success of this event, we’ll be looking to run something similar in two years’ time to give us a chance to get together and discuss all things MyDispense in between Prato Symposium years.
With the event now over, we look forward to seeing you all online for our next meeting (date TBC in late August or early September- keep and eye out for an email soon)!
All the best,
Matt and Adam
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