Personal Statement
Dr Rachel Mullen is a Senior Lecturer in Pharmacy Education in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Liverpool and a registered pharmacist with extensive experience across community and primary care pharmacy. Her career is defined by leadership in experiential learning, placement innovation and pharmacy workforce development, with particular strengths in curriculum design and experiential learning learning across a range of pharmacy sectors. Since joining Liverpool in July 2024, she has played a pivotal role in designing and accrediting the new MPharm programme, leading stakeholder engagement and placement strategy to secure provisional accreditation from the General Pharmaceutical Council.​

Rachel’s teaching and scholarship focus on preparing “prescriber‑ready” pharmacists who can deliver safe, person-centred care in complex healthcare systems. She works closely with partners across the NHS, community pharmacy, primary care networks and professional bodies to co‑create authentic learning, assessment and placement experiences that build clinical reasoning, consultation skills and readiness for prescribing roles. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy an‑award‑winning educator whose work has shaped regional thinking on pharmacy placements.

Research Overview
Rachel’s research spans three interconnected areas: pharmacy workforce, pharmacy services in primary and secondary care, and pedagogic research in pharmacy education. Her early work examined the primary care pharmacy workforce, workforce mobility and skill mix, including national census studies and evaluations of dispensary support staff roles, informing debates on role clarity and workforce planning. She has continued to explore pharmacists’ roles in general practice and secondary care, with studies on hospital discharge processes, medication supply models and pharmacists’ contributions to long‑term condition management.​

More recently, her research has focused on asthma care in community and primary care settings and on understanding what constitutes a “prescriber‑ready pharmacist”, using frameworks such as the Theoretical Domains Framework to capture stakeholder perspectives on future workforce needs. She has supervised doctoral work on community pharmacy’s role in adult asthma care and on new models of care for hospital discharge, alongside supervising Masters and postgraduate research projects across clinical pharmacy and practice research. Her portfolio includes peer‑reviewed publications, national and international conference presentations and invited evaluations for commissioners and professional bodies, with research income across workforce, placement and service development projects.​