The pharmacy profession in Great Britain has identified public health as a key area for future development; at the same time the government has been keen to make full use of pharmacists in pursuing its public health goals. To date, pharmacy has focused on microlevel activities such as health promotion, medicines management and prescribing advice, rather than on wider public health issues such as health inequalities.

The role in health promotion has its origins in the traditional advisory role of the pharmacist, which largely died out following the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948, and was resurrected only following ministerial intervention in 1981. This article traces the origins of the pharmacist's role in public health, illustrating both shifting definitions of public health and changes in pharmacy practice. It describes how the profession was able to re‐establish its advisory role and to develop it into a wider contribution to public health, indicating that this process came about as a result of convergence between a professional imperative to develop its role, on the one hand, and state recognition of the need to draw a broader range of health professionals and lay people into public health activities, on the other.

Convergence required the securing of government support, confirmed in policy documents; the recognition by pharmacy's professional body that embracing public health is a desirable activity; incentives for community pharmacists to carry out such activities; and support from the wider public health community. This article describes how each of these was achieved.

This paper describes mechanisms used by humans to stand on moving platforms, such as a bus or ship, and to combine body orientation and motion information from multiple sensors including vision, vestibular, and proprioception. A simple mechanism, sensory re-weighting, has been proposed to explain how human subjects learn to reduce the effects of inconsistent sensors on balance. Our goal is to replicate this robust balance behavior in bipedal robots. We review results exploring sensory re-weighting in humans and describe implementations of sensory re-weighting in simulation and on a robot.

Scoping studies have been used across a range of disciplines for a wide variety of purposes. However, their value is increasingly limited by a lack of definition and clarity of purpose. The UK's Service Delivery and Organisation Research Programme (SDO) has extensive experience of commissioning and using such studies; twenty four have now been completed.

This review article has four objectives; to describe the nature of the scoping studies that have been commissioned by the SDO Programme; to consider the impact of and uses made of such studies; to provide definitions for the different elements that may constitute a scoping study; and to describe the lessons learnt by the SDO Programme in commissioning scoping studies.

Scoping studies are imprecisely defined but usually consist of one or more discrete components; most commonly they are non-systematic reviews of the literature, but other important elements are literature mapping, conceptual mapping and policy mapping. Some scoping studies also involve consultations with stakeholders including the end users of research.

Scoping studies have been used for a wide variety of purposes, although a common feature is to identify questions and topics for future research. The reports of scoping studies often have an impact that extends beyond informing research commissioners about future research areas; some have been published in peer reviewed journals, and others have been published in research summaries aimed at a broader audience of health service managers and policymakers.

Key lessons from the SDO experience are the need to relate scoping studies to a particular health service context; the need for scoping teams to be multi-disciplinary and to be given enough time to integrate diverse findings; and the need for the research commissioners to be explicit not only about the aims of scoping studies but also about their intended uses. This necessitates regular contact between researchers and commissioners.

Scoping studies are an essential element in the portfolio of approaches to research, particularly as a mechanism for helping research commissioners and policy makers to ask the right questions. Their utility will be further enhanced by greater recognition of the individual components, definitions for which are provided.