Grow Pharma: UK medical cannabis in 2022

In 2022, the team at Grow Pharma will be focused on making medical cannabis more accessible to all those who could benefit.

A jubilant happy new year to all who follow our work at Grow Pharma.

For the uninitiated, Grow Pharma’s mission is to increase access to medical cannabis for patients to better manage the symptoms of their disease. In addition to focusing on training and healthcare professional education, Grow Pharma distributes the broadest range of high-quality prescription cannabis medicines in the UK.

The law was amended in 2018 to allow wider prescribing of cannabis medicines via private medical specialists and, whilst still a niche area we have seen growth every year since then, with a considerable increase last year.

We are proud to cater to over 2,500 patients via our pharmacy partners IPS Pharma. This represents around a third of UK medical cannabis patients at the time of writing.

We want to share our biggest successes of 2021 and our aims for UK medical cannabis in 2022 with you and touch on newly available medicines, including long-anticipated additions to our own GROW branded range of medical cannabis flowers.

More Awareness

Awareness is a key hurdle to overcome for medical cannabis in the UK. Cannabis medicines cannot be accessed via the NHS, GPs are not allowed to prescribe them and have generally not been trained or educated about medical cannabis and do not always understand the differences between over-the-counter CBD and prescribed cannabis medicines.

There are strict limitations on how we can reach patients and educate healthcare professionals about cannabis medicines.

With Covid restricting in-person events we have had to fall back on digital resources to increase awareness. In 2020 we launched OpenCannabis.UK, an informative educational resource on UK medical cannabis for patients, healthcare professionals and the public.

In 2021 we launched our ‘Grow Conversations’, a monthly video podcast in which well-known medical cannabis patient advocate and Grow’s Patient Access Lead, Alex Fraser, interviews industry, doctors, scientists and patients working in medical cannabis.

Grow Conversations will be returning in early 2022 with another series of in-depth interviews covering the exciting developments in medical cannabis happening in the UK and around the world.

More Doctors

In 2022 we are focused on supporting more doctors as they learn about and start to prescribe cannabis medicines. In the summer of 2021, we launched a series of educational webinars for doctors and healthcare professionals with presentations from some of the world’s leading educators on medical cannabis and the endocannabinoid system, including Columbia Care Chief Scientific Officer, Rosemary Mazanet MD and Tilray Chief Medical Officer, Jose Tempero.

More recently we launched Journal Club, which includes two carefully selected studies emailed out every fortnight to interested HCPs to ensure they are kept up to date with the most relevant and important clinical research in medical cannabis. This is a free service for anyone interested to subscribe.

The above resources can be accessed via Grow’s Doctor Portal. Launched in 2021, The Doctor Portal has everything a doctor might need to learn about and start prescribing cannabis medicines including recordings of earlier educational webinars and all Journal Club entries.

Doctors can also find information (including real-time availability updates) on the wide range of cannabis medicines we supply and a community forum for doctors to discuss best-practice and learn from each other.

With the Doctor Portal, Grow is cultivating a community of doctors supporting each other’s learning and practice in this novel area of medicine. Only accessible to doctors, it is worth making sure your doctor is aware of the portal so they can sign-up, learn all about medical cannabis, how it works in the UK and how to prescribe.

More recently we have been working closely with Nottingham Road Clinic, based in Mansfield, who launched a new service at the start of 2022, to their established healthcare and wellbeing clinic, prescribing cannabis medicines to eligible patients in face-to-face and virtual consultations.

It is a testament to our work building trusting relationships with doctors that we are seeing new clinics setting up to prescribe cannabis medicines all the time. All the while we continue to work with cannabis-prescribing clinicians at the various UK clinics who prescribe cannabis medicines.

More Medicines

To date we have focused on ensuring we provide a consistent high-quality standard of care throughout the services we offer. We are proud to have a reliable supply of the widest range of cannabis medicines in the UK and a fantastic team at our partner pharmacy IPS, who are dedicated to ensuring our patients are well looked after. It is our duty to ensure this high standard of care continues as we scale up and supply a growing number of patients.

Increasing our range of medicines has been one of our greatest successes of 2021. We are now the only supplier with a range of medical cannabis capsules from USA based LP Columbia Care, who also supply our range of vape carts launched in November.

We increased our range of flowers by on boarding Tilray in early 2021. We now stock over 25 flower medicines and this number continues to grow. We launched our own range of GROW flowers last October with a 1-1 balanced flower and plan to add to this, our lowest priced range of flowers, very soon.

At Grow Pharma we carry all premium brands available in the UK. This includes Aurora, Tilray, Columbia Care, Spectrum and Althea. With the combination of these premium brands, our own GROW flowers range, the unique delivery methods from Columbia Care and a wide range of oils, we can provide options for every patient need in this diverse and often very personalised field of medicine.

Patients can consult with their doctor about our range of products and medicine information is available for doctors via the Grow Doctor Portal.

More still to come

There are many more projects in the pipeline that we cannot wait to tell you about, including ground-breaking clinical trials, research projects utilising CALYX our patient-data-capture app, brand new medicine lines, more delivery methods and we will be bringing you details of developments from our recently acquired facility in Seville and the hard work being done by the companies we represent.

Join us on this journey to further embed cannabis medicines into everyday clinical practice and making sure they are available to all who might benefit.

Follow us on social media, check out our website and digital services and let your doctor know where they can find us to learn more about medical cannabis.