Wellspring updates: gender minority care and leadership in action

Whether it’s improving curricula to evolve perspectives around patient diversity, or advocating for expanded services and pharmacy leadership, the Canadian Foundation for Pharmacy’s Wellspring Leadership Award recipients James Morrison and Steven Kary are proving their impact on the profession at large.

In 2021, Morrison put his award grant towards completing his Master of Science in Pharmacy from the University of Saskatchewan. His thesis, which focused on determining how educational institutions were evolving their curricula to train students to provide care for sexual and gender minority (SGM) patients, revealed that some Canadian pharmacy schools still have much to do to meet revised accreditation standards from the Canadian Council for Accreditation of Pharmacy Programs (CCAPP).

“Just to see the range across the country was a big surprise,” says Morrison, Director of Pharmacy Operations at Felix Health.

Upon the urging of his thesis supervisor, Holly Mansell, he expanded his scope to include interview participants from all 11 pharmacy schools in Canada, resulting in a more robust analysis. The results showed that pharmacy schools had varying degrees of SGM content, with some participants admitting there was considerable effort still needed to meet new accreditation standards.

Barriers to curricular change included limited curriculum time and guidance, as well as a limited number of instructors with expertise in the subject and fear of getting it wrong. “Some participants talked about difficult situations with students because they were challenging speakers or being overly critical,” says Morrison. “Educators have to be thoughtful and willing to have difficult conversations to help bring students along.”

Morrison, who will be presenting his results at the Canadian Pharmacy Education and Research Conference (CPERC) this June, says he hopes his findings will help pharmacy schools share best practices and determine how to approach adding this content. “Then it’s ultimately about positively affecting the care that our graduates will provide in their communities for SGM patients,” he says.

Pharmacist Steven Kary completed the Master of Health Administration program at the University of Regina’s Johnson-Shoyama School of Public Policy in June 2024. He immediately put his learnings into action—first at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Pharmacy and Nutrition, where he was an instructor, and more recently at the Pharmacy Association of Saskatchewan (PAS), where he took on the role of Director of Professional Practice in August 2024.

“Pretty much immediately when I joined PAS, we started policy consultations with the Ministry of Health and our regulator,” he says. Other aspects of the program focused on leadership and communication skills were extremely valuable too, he adds.

In his current work, Kary and his team are building “strong, collaborative partnerships that are really helping move the needle for pharmacy.” This includes launching strep throat and otitis media services into pharmacies and ongoing initiatives around chronic disease management. “I think the skills that I gained from my Masters program have been instrumental in helping me work with partners on these initiatives.”

Kary has also developed a leadership-focused experiential learning rotation for pharmacy students at PAS. “In their rotations, students are assigned a project and take leadership on the deliverables and how they will spread awareness of what they develop,” he says. “It’s about learning how to lead themselves and then engaging with others.” While it’s difficult for students to develop coalitions and create systemic change in an eight-week rotation, he says the exposure students receive while on rotation at PAS is still invaluable.

Kary has also shared his leadership framework with other leaders within the Saskatchewan Health Authority who provide student rotations. “I’m trying to see how we can align some of the things that we’re focusing on for leadership development across various areas of health care,” he says.