A brilliant medicines symposium, thank you for coming!
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The 2025 Bennett Institute Medicines Symposium
Over two days in December, we brought together around 200 people from across the medicines data community for the 2025 Bennett Institute Medicines Symposium.
We tried to make this an event that welcomes everyone working with medicines data across the NHS and academia: medicines optimisation teams who use data to monitor clinical activity and work directly with clinicians to drive change, researchers exploring the benefits and risks of treatments, and technical teams building the tools and data flows for dashboards and analysis.
Richard Croker presenting a brief history of prescribing data.
Day 1 featured keynotes from Diane Ashiru-Oredope on antimicrobial stewardship and David Webb on pharmacy and the 10 Year Health Plan. We also had four great sessions covering everything from how prescribing data is made, through OpenPrescribing’s 10th birthday and the first Bennett Prize, to real-world medicines optimisation work and cutting-edge research.
Ruth Dales, National Medicines Safety Improvement Programme Team at NHS England receiving the Bennett Prize for their project on National quality improvement intervention to reduce high-risk oral methotrexate prescribing.
Day 2 was more informal and collaborative, with demonstrations of Bennett Institute tools (OpenSAFELY, OpenPrescribing and OpenPrescribing Hospitals, OpenCodelists, and OpenCodeCounts) and a live recording of the Aural Apothecary podcast.
Arina Tamborska demonstrating our new OpenCodeCounts tool.
Jon Massey demonstrating new features of our OpenCodelists tool.
Drop-in sessions on Day 2 where attendees could chat with the Bennett team about our tools and technical questions.
What made it special
A few things really stood out. The diversity of the community: medicines optimisation teams, academic researchers, data scientists, NHS analysts, pharmacists, GPs, and people from organisations like NHS BSA and NICE, all in one room. The quality of the talks: people shared real work, real challenges, and real solutions. The enthusiasm for collaboration: so many conversations that started or ended with “we should work together on this”. And the Bennett Prize entries turned the OpenPrescribing session into a proper fireworks display, the kind of celebration that 10 years deserves.
Thank you
Thank you to everyone who made the journey to Oxford. To our speakers, both from the Bennett Institute and from across the wider medicines community. To Diane Ashiru-Oredope and David Webb for their keynotes and all our speakers for their inspiring presentations. To all our Bennett Prize entrants and winners. To our funders and collaborators. And to everyone who helped organise and ensure the smooth running of both days.
What’s next
Over the next few weeks we’ll be uploading summaries of each session, including video recordings, so keep an eye on the blog if you want to revisit the talks or catch up on what you missed.