Paul Palmer

Dr Paul R Palmer runs a Pharmaceutical Consultancy established in 2011, is named on UK and EU licenses as a Qualified Person. Paul has 40 years' experience across pharmaceutical manufacturing, supply, quality assurance, regulatory compliance and medical devices.

He began his career in microbiology in 1986 and has since worked across analytical Quality Control, Quality Assurance, GMP, pharmaceutical Quality systems, auditing since 1997, supplier oversight, manufacturing, clinical trials, regulatory affairs and QP Batch Certification. He has been actively releasing medicinal products as a Qualified Person since 2004. 

His experience encompasses sterile and non-sterile manufacture, biological products, radiopharmaceuticals, clinical-trial materials, licensed and unlicensed medicines and complex international supply chains. 

Throughout his career, Paul has deliberately taken opportunities that broadened his understanding of how pharmaceutical organisations actually work. This has included microbiology and laboratory operations, manufacturing and facility design, storage and distribution, supplier management, computerised systems, Quality Management Systems and regulatory inspections. 

As Head of Quality, he helped establish and operate a secure IP-based Quality system across a 15-site pharmaceutical organisation; elsewhere, his work has ranged from establishing new manufacturing and release sites to supporting organisations following serious compliance failures. His current approach is increasingly focused on helping companies move from recurring quality problems and reactive working towards sustained organisational control.

People and systems have remained a constant theme. Paul has always been interested not only in whether a process complies with GMP, but why people behave as they do within that process, how responsibilities and interfaces influence performance, and how systems can be designed to make the correct action easier. 

Paul studied psychology as part of his MSc in Quality Management in the early 1990s, and that interest in culture, behaviour and decision-making has continued throughout his career. His natural curiosity is perhaps unusual for someone whose professional responsibilities require a healthy degree of caution: rather than simply accepting that a system works, he tends to want to understand why it works — and, more importantly, why it sometimes does not.

That curiosity has also taken him beyond the traditional boundaries of pharmaceutical Quality. Alongside his BSc in Applied Biology and MSc in Quality Management, Paul completed an Executive MBA and was awarded a Doctorate in Business Administration in 2025, strengthening his focus on the relationship between Quality, operational performance and business value. He teaches on the Qualified Person course at University College London appointed asHonorary Senior Lecturer. 

Paul's training and consultancy experience combine scientific knowledge, GMP and regulatory experience with practical Quality-system implementation, business understanding and four decades of lessons learned from seeing pharmaceutical organisations at their best and helping address the concernswhen activities and projects have failed to achieve the desired outcome.