After two challenging years during which hospital pharmacists and their frontline healthcare colleagues have worked tirelessly for their patients, the European Association of Hospital Pharmacists (EAHP) held its first educational in-person event. Between the 23rd and the 25th of March more than 1932 hospital pharmacists from over 50 different countries came together for the 26th edition of EAHP's congress.

The programme was packed with seminars, workshops and interactive sessions focused on the changing roles of hospital pharmacists in a changing world. The keynotes touched on value-based healthcare, shared decision making and cell and gene therapies. As usual the exhibition area was a big draw for participants that wanted to learn more about the latest technologies and network. Also, EAHP's team welcomed numerous individuals at the EAHP booth to talk about the European Statements of Hospital Pharmacy, the self-assessment tool and the Association's advocacy work. Students had the opportunity to learn more about ethical challenges during the programme specially designed for them. In addition, they got to meet with representatives of the European Pharmaceutical Students' Association (EPSA). Since EAHP turned 50 on the 6th of March, a special history walk was set up for congress participants which allowed them to discover EAHP's achievements over the last 5 decades. The first Special Interest Group of EAHP focused on Hazardous Medicinal Products released the finding of its work on Wednesday afternoon. Attendees of this session learned more about the classification landscape for hazardous medicinal products and the need for a European definition.

EAHP's poster walk, a unique Congress feature, brought together participants and poster authors to discuss the latest research developments. The Scientific Committee awarded the 1st prize for poster submissions to Benedict Morath for the abstract and poster titled 'Implementation of an interprofessional pre-operative medication management program in cardiac surgery – a pre post quality improvement study'. The 2022 Good Practice Initiative (GIP) award and the Statement Implementation Award went to Beatriz Ardizone for her work on the 'Web Dialogue: One more step in telepharmacy'.

EAHP's 26th Congress also celebrated innovation and excellence with several other awards focused on Statement implementation, students and contributions to EAHP. The Board of Directors awarded the Statement Implementation Award to the GPI winner Beatriz Ardizone. This award acknowledges contributions with a specific emphasis on implementing the European Statements of Hospital Pharmacy. The 2022 EAHP-EPSA Student Science Award went to Aiva Birne for her abstract 'Evaluation of harmful and potentially harmful excipients for newborns found in medications used in children's clinical university hospital (department of neonatology) in 2019'.

For the first time, EAHP's President András Süle presented the "EAHP Board of Directors Professional Excellence Award" which recognises an individual who has made outstanding contributions to EAHP and the hospital pharmacy profession. This award went to Leonidas Tzimis, a Greek hospital pharmacist that has worked for many years on harnessing the benefits of digitalisation for hospital pharmacies.

EAHP would like to thank its Silver Partner Clinigen Direct and its Corporate Partner Omnicell for their continued support.

Hospital pharmacists are cordially invited to EAHP's 27th Congress taking place from the 22nd to the 24th of March 2023 in Lisbon, Portugal.