Our approach to using Artificial Intelligence

Advancing patient safety through responsible AI 

As the Royal College of Pharmacy’s knowledge business, it is our mission to empower every health professional with knowledge about the safe and effective use of medicines.   

We recognise that ongoing developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technology have the potential to support clinical decision-making, increase accessibility to medicines information and improve patient outcomes. 

Furthermore, AI has the potential to transform the way organisations work, to drive efficiency with administrative tasks and free up time to focus on initiatives where expert critical thinking and judgement are required. 

However, the use of AI introduces potential risks, such as data security breaches, regulatory non-compliance, intellectual property exposure and the spread of misinformation.   

Given these considerations, we believe the use of AI and digital technologies in our organisation must be responsible and serve our purpose to advance the safe and effective use of medicines.  

As creators of trusted evidence-based medicines information, we are publishing this statement to set out the principles that guide our use of AI and digital technologies across our organisation. 

Ensuring the accuracy and integrity of our content 

Protecting patient safety through the provenance, trustworthiness and evidence base of our pharmaceutical content is paramount.  Our accredited content creation processes ensure we produce clear, concise and actionable guidance that is trusted to support confident decision-making on the safe and effective use of medicines. 

Any level of uncertainty or inaccuracy in clinical content presents a potential risk, which is why we do not use generative AI, including LLMs, in the writing, checking, and approval of our pharmaceutical content. 

We maintain rigorous standards of human oversight and content validation that align with our commitment to content integrity.  Content updates are researched, executed, and overseen by humans.  Our team of expert clinical and scientific writers assesses evidence and reviews changes made by other clinical and scientific writers before publication.  Certain content is further assessed by external experts and committees, and may undergo external peer review.  

Content governance and stewardship 

We are committed to making our content available and useful wherever health professionals need it. As new technologies emerge, we are increasingly invited to work with partners to deliver our content in innovative ways, including through AI-enabled tools and platforms. 

All partnerships are subject to robust governance, careful risk assessment and responsible implementation to ensure our content is used accurately and in the right context to support health professionals in improving patient outcomes.   

At the same time, we implement and require our partners to implement technical, legal and operational measures to protect our intellectual property and prevent unauthorised access, extraction or use of our content.  We aim to ensure that our trusted pharmaceutical knowledge is accessed only through approved channels, helping to preserve its accuracy, integrity and provenance, and reduce the risk of misinformation. 

If you wish to enquire about licensing our data for use in AI platforms and tools, please get in touch. 

Innovation in content delivery 

AI has the potential to improve the speed, efficiency and accessibility of content delivery across our products and platforms. In line with our mission to empower health professionals with trusted knowledge on the safe and effective use of medicines, we aim to make relevant medicines information available intuitively at the point of need. 

We will adopt AI technologies where they improve access to and discovery of our content, while ensuring that its accuracy, integrity and appropriate context are maintained. All applications of AI will be subject to robust governance and oversight, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements and supporting safe, informed decision-making that helps protect patient safety. 

Empowering our people with AI 

We encourage the responsible use of AI within our organisation to help improve efficiency.  Our teams have access to an organisation-approved AI assistant operating with strict security, privacy and governance controls to ensure our data is not used to train public AI models.  This provides support for day-to-day activity including report writing, summarising of internal documents and idea generation for internal use.  The aim is to educate and enable our teams to focus more of their time on critical thinking tasks that increase accessibility to medicines information and improve patient outcomes. 

As a wholly owned subsidiary of the Royal College of Pharmacy, our success is reinvested into improving our content, products and services and in support of the College’s charitable objectives.  We are trusted for our independence, editorial integrity and shared commitment to patient safety.    

We embrace the opportunities AI presents to improve access to trusted pharmaceutical knowledge, enhance the way we work and better serve health professionals.  In doing so, we remain guided by our responsibility to independently source, evaluate and communicate the most accurate information supporting the safe and effective use of medicines to improve patient safety.

7 October 2026

Pharmaceutical Press monitors digital transformation and developments in artificial intelligence closely and will update this statement as appropriate.