First off, you have to love the way AI creates images that are not quite anatomically correct. I decided not to fix this one as it seems quite indicative of how many pharmacists feel these days.

Not long ago I was talking to a class of third year pharmacy students about disruption, innovation and the value of the profession.  I asked the students if they felt like the public understood their job.  Did they really know what we did all day, besides the obvious injecting of countless vaccines and the handing out of pills.  I also asked if they had heard the line that as students they will push the profession forward, saving us from a patient drain to the likes of Amazon and other such distributive systems.  There were a lot of heads nodding yes.

And yet, when I sat in their place almost 30 years ago I had the same experience.  We knew then that patients truly did not understand what we did as pharmacists AND we were told we would push the profession forward as we embarked on our new careers.  

So what gives?  It’s been 30 years and not much has changed.  

While we may have the trust of the public, they do not see our value.  We still have to aggressively advocate for ourselves to the public, to government and to third party payers.  

How can students push the profession forward when as new grads they step into established practices and must conform to and adopt the current culture they find themselves working in?  It has to be us as established pharmacists and managers of dispensary teams taking the lead on practice change.  

Sometimes when we are thinking of trying to change and move forward we can get into a rut of idea gathering and thinking about all the ideas we encounter.   We are always looking for new methods, new concepts, new inspiration to really motivate change.    I would argue however that we have it backwards.  

Inspiration often does not motivate us enough to move into action.  It can often leave us in the planning and ruminating stage, and often we are stuck here indefinitely not knowing how to actually move forward.  As James Clear states in his book “Atomic Habits”, “The most effective form of learning is practice not planning.”

It’s often when we take that first step to implement a change, even if it is a baby step, we see the fruit of our action, the positive impact, the benefits to our patients, our team and to ourselves as clinicians.  This experience is then what inspires us to endure when things are difficult and motivates us to continue to move forward when it is so easy to slide back into what is familiar and what we have “always done”.  

It takes a strong leader with a vision for their team to implement change and then to keep coming back to the core values and reasons for doing so.  Reminding team members of why we do what we do and providing opportunities for impactful experiences, creates a positive feedback loop that gives fresh inspiration and motivation for the action we want to encourage.