“It is very much more than just turning up one evening in a pretty dress,” pharmacist Emily Bond tells C+D about competing in Miss Great Britain.  

“Everybody has a campaign. You are expected to be a public speaker and talk about a subject you’re passionate about.” 

For the second year in a row Bond is competing in England’s longest running pageant, and was announced as a finalist for the regional Sussex finals earlier this month. 

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Bond is a clinical lead pharmacist at Homewell Practice in Havant, Hampshire, but took up pageantry after “missing a little bit of sparkle” in her life. 

She told C+D last October that the “best part of pageantry” was raising “money and awareness for charitable causes”, and this year she’s decided to stay a little closer to her day job in the causes she’s promoting. 

“It occurred to me no one else in pageantry does healthcare advocacy like I do. I wanted to look at healthcare inequalities and the way I contribute to managing and reducing those in my day-to-day work life.” 

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She started her Elegance in Equity Instagram page that aims to “improve professional education and patient access to lifesaving technologies and medicines” and is keen for a non-healthcare audience to understand her work. 

“One of the things I’m passionate about is access to continuous glucose monitor (CGM). There’s probably a lot more patients who are on insulin who would benefit from it.  

“So in my role, it’s thinking ‘how do we get that evidence’ and demonstrate there’s other hidden cohorts of patients that would benefit from CGM.” 

Running her father's race 

After winning the GP or PCN Pharmacist of the Year at the 2025 C+D Awards, Bond says a lot more interest in her work has followed since, as she will be visiting House of Commons on December 10 to “discuss advocacy and health benefits of CGM”. 

With her pageantry, she’ll be attending the Miss Great Britain Sussex final at the end of June and if she wins, will attend the national finals in October. 

In her previous pageantry campaign last year, Bond raised money for women’s health charity Wellbeing of Women in memory of her GP colleague who passed away, as well as for a Duchenne muscular dystrophy charity Alex’s Wish. 

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“For this one, I’m raising money for Cancer Research UK. I’m training for a 10k which is very unusual for me because I’m not a runner.” 

The run has a special place in Bond’s heart as she’s running the Barry Richards 10k next summer, a race launched in memory of her own father. 

“He did marathons, 80 milers. He really enjoyed it. Sadly, he died in his mid-40s when I was 13. He was out for a run and went into cardiac arrest.  

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“We didn’t realise it at the time he had arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC). That was all a big shock. He died in 1995. 

“He was very well respected in the local running community in Sussex, so they launched a memorial race in his name. It’s a Hastings Runners members-only race but they’re letting me do it as an honorary member.”