How Pharmaceutical Medicine expertise can contribute to protecting children from digital harms
Posted on: Thursday 22 January 2026
Author: Dr Sheuli Porkess PFPM
As clinicians and health professionals grapple with mounting evidence of harm to children and young people from screens and digital devices, pharmaceutical medicine is a source of expertise that could help. While our field focuses on medicines and health technologies designed to improve health, the regulatory frameworks and expertise we’ve developed over decades can offer valuable lessons for managing the unintended consequences of consumer technology on young people’s wellbeing.
New to our specialty? Click here to find out more about pharmaceutical medicine.
Pharmaceutical medicine is a medical speciality focused on the discovery, development, evaluation, registration, monitoring and medical aspects of marketing medical technologies, including medicines, for the benefit of patients and public health.
Pharmaceutical physicians bridge clinical practice with scientific research, regulatory affairs and policy. We work across industry, academia, regulatory bodies and healthcare systems to ensure that medicines and medical technologies are developed responsibly, evaluated rigorously and monitored continuously for both benefits and risks throughout their lifecycle.
Our training encompasses clinical trial design, benefit-risk assessment, pharmacovigilance (monitoring safety after approval), regulatory science and health policy. Importantly, we understand how to navigate the complex intersection of innovation, commercial pressures and patient safety.
The Parallel Challenge: Technology That Impacts Health
The concerns emerging about digital devices and social media platforms affecting children’s mental health, physical development and wellbeing present striking parallels to challenges we routinely address in pharmaceutical medicine.
Many people rely on large language models and AI assistants for health information. However, these tools have often demonstrated an ’empathy gap’ that may impact child development and safety. Whilst social media can be a benefit for helping young people connect and learn, it actively promotes harmful behaviours, such as teenage sunbed use, with melanoma charities calling for regulatory intervention. Health misinformation is proliferating across all platforms, undermining public health efforts – and this is an issue that Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine is actively working on.
Whilst technologies like smart phones weren’t designed as medical devices, they are nevertheless impacting health outcomes at population scale, particularly among vulnerable young users.
What Pharmaceutical Medicine Can Contribute
FPM members possess directly transferable expertise in three critical areas.
Benefit-Risk Assessment
In pharmaceutical medicine, we don’t simply ask ‘does this work?’ We systematically evaluate whether benefits outweigh harms across different populations, including vulnerable groups, like children. A benefit-risk assessment framework could inform how we assess digital technologies, considering not just utility or engagement metrics but comprehensive health impacts across physical, mental and social dimensions.
Oversight of Roll-Out
We understand phased implementation. Medicines progress through carefully controlled trials before widespread use, with specific protections for children. The current model of deploying consumer technologies to millions of users (including children) without comparable staged evaluation represents a fundamentally different risk tolerance. Our experience with controlled market access, risk management plans and paediatric investigation plans could inform more responsible technology deployment strategies.
Monitoring Long-Term Outcomes
Pharmacovigilance systems monitor medicines throughout their market lifetime, identifying both intended outcomes and unintended consequences. The UK already requires manufacturers of medical devices, including health-related apps, to conduct ongoing post-market surveillance for risks and side-effects throughout the device’s lifetime. However, consumer technologies affecting children’s health currently lack equivalent monitoring frameworks. Our members understand how to design and implement these surveillance systems.
Learning from Health Technology Regulation
The regulatory landscape for health technologies offers concrete models that could be adapted for consumer technology affecting young people.
Medical devices undergo rigorous conformity assessments before market access and continuous post-market surveillance thereafter. Consumer technologies with demonstrated health impacts on children face no comparable requirements.
Our expertise in developing industry standards through education and policy work, including initiatives around clinical trial transparency, demonstrates that meaningful industry engagement is possible. Many major technology companies now have health divisions led by Chief Medical Officers, creating potential entry points for constructive dialogue grounded in health protection principles.
Why This Matters to FPM Members
This issue resonates with our membership on multiple levels. Many FPM members are involved in medical education at various stages, giving us direct insight into how digital technologies affect learning and professional development. More personally, as people who care and are responsible for family and loved ones, we share the concerns of families navigating an increasingly complex digital landscape.
Our commitment to combating health misinformation aligns naturally with addressing how digital platforms amplify false health claims and promote harmful behaviours to young audiences. The ‘Doctored Truths’ report from Havas Lynx, that FPM contributed to, highlights how misinformation spreads through digital channels, directly undermining the evidence-based approach we champion.
We don’t claim to have all the answers to protecting children from digital harms. However, we do bring decades of experience managing the introduction of powerful technologies that affect health, balancing innovation with safety, and developing regulatory frameworks that protect vulnerable populations.
Those working on responsible technology standards need not start from scratch. We’ve been developing approaches to similar challenges in the heavily regulated worlds of medicines and health technology for generations and we’re happy to explore applying those lessons beyond our immediate domain, in service of a generation growing up in an unprecedented digital experiment.
How to work with us
The Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine welcomes the opportunity to share the learnings described in this article with clinical colleagues, policymakers and our medical colleagues working in technology companies. Get in touch with us if you’d like to collaborate by emailing fpm@fpm.org.uk.