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Michael is a leader in the industry. He attends Alitam Board meetings as a key advisor and influence on ongoing policy and strategy. Michael is passionate in supporting the build of a revolutionary ‘pharmacy of the future concept’. He is known amongst his peers for his vast knowledge, experience, expertise and operational ability.

He is currently the CEO and main shareholder of Medicare, a pharmacy group consisting of 53 pharmacies in Northern Ireland.

He obtained a BSc (Hons) Pharmacy Degree from Brighton School of Pharmacy in 1986 and then registered with the Pharmaceutical Society of N.Ireland in 1987. He acquired his first pharmacy in Shatesbury Square Belfast in 1988, and is the founder of the MediCare Pharmacy Group with over 32 years of experience in the Pharmaceutical Industry, growing the group to 53 pharmacies.

He has a leading and influential role within community pharmacy and in all the major pharmacy professional bodies that negotiate the future direction and role for pharmacy in N.Ireland. He is also a member and past Chairman of the Pharmaceutical Contractors Committee in N. Ireland (now CPNI) and also past Chairman of the EHSSB Area Pharmaceutical Committee, as well as being a past member of the Professional Advisory Panel to GlaxoSmithKline PLC and member of Pharmaceutical Standards working group. Michael is also a Director on the Board of the National Pharmaceutical Association (NPA).

In his spare time, Michael also sits on the board of Governors of a local primary school and is a Trustee of a Belfast-based charity dealing with Drug and Alcohol problems.

Although pharmacy was in his blood, Sukhjit began his career as a solicitor at a highly prestigious London firm, practicing within a department consistently rated in the top five globally. Clients included leading public figures and international corporations. Often working on ground-breaking cases Sukhjit was able to enhance the reputation of the firm by setting new legal precedents and consistently delivering excellence for clients.

With an entrepreneurial spirt burning brightly Sukhjit left the legal profession and now works as a healthcare business development consultant. Drawing on his in-depth knowledge of how a pharmacy operates; gained from growing up on the shop-floor as the son of an independent pharmacist; combined with his business acumen and legal network has positioned him as a leading advisor in the Midlands.

Amongst other projects Sukhjit has consulted on the design and build of multi-million pound health centres, relocation of large GP surgeries into combined pharmacy/GP purpose-built buildings, and introducing efficiencies within pharmacy practice to increase net profit beyond clients’ expectations.

Charity also plays an important role in Sukhjit’s life and he was proud to be a founding member of Apnee Sehat, a charity which purports to improve the awareness of diabetes in the South Asian community. The organisation is multi-award winning and is supported by The Prince’s Trust. Sukhjit is also an active member of the South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust.

The Alitam project is one that excites Sukhjit greatly and synchronises with his belief that through modernisation and consolidation of independent pharmacies will emerge the ‘pharmacy of the future’.

Prashant Patel graduated from Leicester School of Pharmacy with a BPharm degree in 1979 and is the Founder and Managing Director of Clockwork Pharmacy Group which he has grown from scratch, with its first branch in Victoria Park Hackney in 1985, to 11 branches currently.

He is a results-orientated leader; driven to innovation, diversification and calculated risk and at the same time to manage costs and establish strategic, mutually beneficial partnerships and relationships with users, vendors, and service providers. He is adept at creating strategic alliances to expand market share and profitability, and excels at building and retaining high performance teams by hiring, developing, and motivating skilled professionals.

Under his direction Clockwork Pharmacy Group trail blazed and set up the framework for the following innovative services which are now available in many Pharmacies in the United Kingdom:

• First Pharmacy to create and introduce GP consultations in person or by phone or internet within Pharmacy.
• First ever Pharmacy to ensure that all Pharmacists would be legally eligible to vaccinate and inject.
• First ever Pharmacy to create and provide vaccination services to include all vaccinations.
• First ever Pharmacy to create and provide Yellow Fever Vaccinations and certification
• First ever Pharmacy to offer peace of mind and legal DNA paternity and all other relationship testing.
• First ever independent pharmacy to be registered with the care quality commission.

He has also led the expansion and diversification of Clockwork Group into an award winning real estate developer and investor.
Prashant is very passionate about building the pharmacy of the future and joins a very strong and compelling team in designing the future of Pharmacy.

Dr Ravi Ganatra BDS (Lond) MFDS RCS (Eng) MJDF Ravi qualified as a Dental Surgeon in 2007 and achieved membership of the Royal College of Surgeons just one year later in 2008.

Ravi became a director of Ravika Ltd in 2014 and now has many years experience of the business side of community pharmacy. He also has significant experience of the operational side of dental practices so has a unique view of the role of Community Pharmacy in the wider healthcare environment which he believes is key to the Pharmacy of the Future concept.

He also has many years of regulatory experience as a member of the Fitness to Practise Panel at the General Dental Council for over 7 years, a position which gives him an insight into the regulation of healthcare professions. He is proud to have assisted many dental practitioners through regulatory proceedings with his experience of the process.

He is passionate about the Pharmacy of the Future concept that Alitam embodies and is honoured to be a part of the team responsible for seeing the vision come to fruition, for the benefit of patients, customers and pharmacy businesses.

Alitam Group is delighted to announce Sir Kenneth Olisa as Chairman. He forms part of the management team building the ‘Pharmacy of the future’ concept.

Ken is Founder and Chairman of Restoration Partners, the boutique technology merchant bank and architects of Inogesis formerly known as The Virtual Technology Cluster model. Ken’s technology career spans over 30 years commencing with IBM from whom he won a scholarship while at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge. In 1992, after twelve years as a senior executive at Wang Labs in the US and Europe, Ken founded Interregnum, the technology merchant bank. He was elected as a Fellow of the British Computer Society in 2006.

He is currently Chairman of Interswitch (Africa’s largest e-payments company). He is a former Director of Thomson Reuters, a former deputy Chair at the Institute of directors and Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC) where he coined the famous epigram “More Soviet than City” to describe the manner of his departure.

Ken is a Freeman of the City of London, Liveryman and Past Master of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, Patron of Thames Reach (for which he received an OBE in 2010), and Chairman of charity Shaw Trust. He was an original member of the Postal Services Commission (PostComm) and the Independent Parliamentary Standard Authority (IPSA) and is the Founder and Chairman of the Aleto Foundation. He is a past Sunday Times Not for Profit Non-Executive Director of the year and was named Number 1 in the 2016 Powerlist’s roster of the UK’s most influential black people. In 2013 Ken and his wife, Julia, endowed the Olisa Library at his alma mater Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. In 2015, Her Majesty the Queen appointed Ken as Her Majesty’s Lord-Lieutenant for Greater London and he was knighted in the 2018 New Year’s Honours List for services to business and philanthropy.

In September 2018 Ken was appointed as the director on the board of Huawei a Chinese multinational networking, telecommunications equipment and Services Company. Sir Kenneth is President of London Youth, a member network of 450+ community youth organisations working across London, supporting tens of thousands of young Londoners each year through their sports, arts, employment and social action programmes and outdoor learning at their residential centres in East Sussex and Buckinghamshire.

Mark is one of the founding pharmacists in the Alitam Group based in Ireland and is committed to developing pharmacy of the future with his Alitam colleagues.

He holds a PhD in pharmaceutics and has extensive experience in the healthcare industry having worked with Servier Laboratories and as Co-founder/Director of Solvotrin Therapeutics, Lifelab Therapeutics and the Heartbeat Trust. He is a former member of the Council of the Pharmaceutical Society in Ireland and previously served on the Expert Advisory Group of the Human Medicines division of the Health Protection Regulatory Authority.

Mark holds honorary positions as Research Professor in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Trinity College, Dublin and UCD Professor in the School of Medicine in University College, Dublin. He is Co-Principal Investigator of the Genuity Science Heart Failure programme, the largest whole genome sequencing project in heart failure to date. He is also Co-Principal Investigator of the St Vincent’s Screening TO Prevent Heart Failure (STOP-HF) programme. STOP-HF won a Royal College of General Practitioners Award in 2015 and is part of the American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology Guidelines on heart failure since 2017.

Olivier Picard has been a community pharmacist for over 20 years. He trained as a pharmacist in France where he obtained a PhD in pharmacy but has spent most of his working life in the UK. Olivier was also one of the first pharmacists to become a non medical independent prescriber in 2007, a post graduate certificate obtained with the University of Reading.

He was an area manager for Moss Pharmacy until 2005 and established his own business in 2006.

Olivier currently sits on the Thames Valley LPC as an independent committee member and has worked with the LPC in PSNC on rural matters for many years. He is also a board member of the National Pharmacy Association. He has developed an interest in travel medicine and has established a very successful travel clinic business in his pharmacies. He was also one of the first pharmacists to participate in Influenza immunisation In 2007/08 and his pharmacies often participate in pilots for new services (NHS and Private). Olivier is always keen to develop and implement new services in community pharmacies to further strengthen the role of pharmacists.

Olivier is media trained and is often heard on local and national radio stations and has made appearances on BBC World News Channel and on BBC television to discuss and promote the valuable work done by community pharmacists every day.

Olivier loves sport, he is an excellent skier and a keen golfer when time allows. He is very excited to be taking part in “The Pharmacy of the Future” concept.

Dinesh is an Alitam Operational Director and part of a large team responsible for the Group in meeting its strategic targets across the UK region. The team is responsible in evaluating how Alitam can constantly improve its working practices across all its pharmacies.

Having run multiple pharmacy groups of his own with turnover in excess of £25m, Dinesh has over 40 years experience of community pharmacy & multisite operations. His expertise includes cost control, people management, training  & business development, as well as successfully spearheading multiple acquisitions with a buy and build policy.

He holds a keen interest in global financial matters and ancient history, having been established as a financial  markets trader for over 30 years.

Abdool was the first appointed Alitam Operational Director and part of a large team responsible for the Group in meeting its strategic targets across the UK region. The team is responsible in evaluating how Alitam can constantly improve its working practices across all its pharmacies.

Abdool qualified as a pharmacist in 1985. He was branch manager for a small multiple before purchasing his first pharmacy in Ewell. He later took over Buckley Pharmacy in Ashtead where he now has 2 branches. He has won awards such as C&D Platinum design Award and Alphega Community Pharmacist Award.

Abdool is a pre-registration tutor. He served on Surrey LPC for 10 years, including Vice Chairman. He firmly believes that community pharmacies can gain a bigger share of the over-counter trade by identifying new innovative health care products and services to better meet current customer needs.

Patrick is an Alitam Operational Director for the Ireland region and is responsible for the Group in meeting its strategic targets. The team is responsible in evaluating how Alitam can constantly improve its working practices across all its pharmacies, including the use of latest technology and new product and service lines.

For over 40 years, Patrick has been active in developing the Community Pharmacy as a byword for excellence in healthcare and customer service. As GM of McSweeny group Patrick co-developed Ireland’s first pan-European community pharmacy group, successfully integrating over 40 pre-established Irish pharmacies into a corporate structure. An adamant supporter of the advantages and importance of the independent community pharmacy, Patrick specialised in restructuring businesses to maximise operational efficiency and internal organisation to ensure utmost customer satisfaction and bottom line performance. The success of this model represented the benefits of combining the commercial capability of corporate pharmacy with the personalistion of service and customer loyalty of the independent community pharmacy.

Patrick continues to push the parameters and possibilities of community pharmacy and since 2014 has been independently developing the para-pharmacy model in Ireland.

In the face of the rise of online shopping and direct-to-customer sales, Patrick strives to reduce dependence on mass-market product by product specialisation and individualised customer-focused service.

Bolaji is an Alitam Operational Director and part of a large team responsible in areas such as process evaluation and process improvement.

Bolaji has over 25 years of experience, having overseen the development of 7 community pharmacies across south London. She has been responsible for both the planning and the execution of the strategic direction of Millennium Pharmacy. She has also taken lead of the Post Office and Human Resources divisions of the company in addition to having been a prescribing pharmacist. She is currently the PCN lead pharmacist for the Fiveways Primary Care Network.

Bolaji also has previous managerial experience at Boots and holds a BPharm (Hons).

Nick is an Alitam Operational Director and part of a large team responsible for the Group in meeting its strategic targets across the UK region. Nick focuses more specifically on our operation in Wales and Evaluates how we can constantly improve our working practices amongst the local pharmacies in that region.

Nick began his career in community pharmacy in 1996, working as a frontline pharmacist in both independent and chain outlets for 11 years. Nick has since built his own small chain of pharmacies in South Wales. Nick’s broad range of experience at the coalface and as a Director and superintendent at Thornes Pharmacy Ltd enables him to offer a wealth of knowledge at both a strategic and practical level.