Background The children of today are the medicine users of tomorrow. Their use of medicines is increasing, they lack knowledge about medicines, are very autonomous in their handling of medicines and do not talk much about medicines with their parents, all resulting in drug-related problems. Thus, medicines education has been carried out in more than 90 Danish primary schools by pharmacy interns between 2011 and 2018 in two-hour sessions. In 2016, the activity was developed to be carried out by community pharmacists and expanded in length to last an entire day, the so-called School Medicine Theme Day (SMT). Until summer 2023 the SMT will take place in 80 school classes all over Denmark. Developing, organizing and running the SMT requires a lot of interdisciplinary and logistic efforts—efforts that pharmacists in other countries might as well learn from, if they plan to run a similar activity.

Purpose The purpose of the presentation is to describe the development, organization and content of the SMT in order for pharmacists in other countries to learn from the Danish experiences.

Method A long row of methods and methodologies were and are used for developing and organizing the SMT, such as pilot testing, dialogues, interviews, workshops, interdisciplinary project team and steering committee meetings, participant-oriented observations, recruitment through external and internal presentations and social media.

Findings Interdisciplinarity (involvement of teachers, didactically trained persons etc.), sufficient funding, patience, communication and strict time management are some of the ingredients in creating a successful SMT. The presentation will elaborate further on all these ingredients. The SMT itself consists of 11 different educational hands-on activities, including a “medicine at home”- exercise, medicines Bingo, questionnaire on chronic pain for school children, video clip -based dialogue, medicines relay, presentations, PowerPoints, exercise regarding pain threshold, role play, package inserts exercise and drug release experiments. The presentation will describe and discuss these educational activities.

Conclusion The presentation will describe lessons learned when it comes to developing a health promoting community pharmacy activity for school children, striving towards making the medicine users of tomorrow more knowledgeable, skilled, and competent to act than the medicine users of today. Additional information: The project is funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation.