AUGUST 2022 – Long-time CFP donor and former pharmacy faculty member at the University of Toronto, Linda MacKeigan believes the Foundation’s role in supporting pharmacy research is an especially important one.
That’s because, as a recipient of a CFP Innovation Fund grant in 2000, MacKeigan has experienced firsthand how beneficial it is to get financial support and recognition for pharmacy practice research initiatives. Her CFP grant was used to support a practice research study on the pharmacist’s role in home care—and she has been donating to the Foundation ever since.
Retired since 2017, MacKeigan has had a varied career in pharmacy. She obtained her BScPhm from the University of Toronto and spent most of her initial practice years in a clinical role in a Toronto teaching hospital. “When you’re working with other healthcare practitioners on a daily basis, you really get to see how everyone contributes to the healthcare of patients,” she says. “It was an experience I enjoyed very much.”
Interested in learning about strategies for expanding pharmacists’ clinical roles, MacKeigan enrolled at the University of Arizona in 1985 to obtain her PhD in pharmacoeconomics and upon graduation took an academic position at Ohio State University. A few years later she was recruited back to the U of T Faculty of Pharmacy to introduce pharmacoeconomics into the undergraduate and graduate curricula, and taught this subject for some 15 years.
Over time her research focused more and more on new roles for pharmacists in the community, for example Ontario’s MedsCheck and Pharmaceutical Opinion programs.
She says pharmacy practice research is an important tool for convincing governments and other third-party payors that properly remunerated community pharmacist services can have value, beyond ensuring that a prescription is dispensed on a timely basis and that patients understand the directions. “This is partially true for complex or frail patients, and supports arguments for expanding the pharmacist’s role into nontraditional settings such as homecare agencies,” she adds.
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