PNOW: Sister Mary Gonzales-Duffy (the first female president of the ASHP) was an initial influence on your career. Tell us how you worked with her throughout the years.

JO: We have had long careers that have been different yet filled with many coincidences. I first met her when she was coming to our little mission church in Muse, Penn., and teaching Sunday school to the little children. Then, some years later, I ended up in pharmacy school and discovered that down the street from Duquesne University was Mercy Hospital where Sister Gonzales resided. Also, she happened to be a student at Duquesne University School of Pharmacy. She was a junior and I was a freshman so I made a courtesy call to Mercy Hospital to visit her and she offered me a job! I had no knowledge of what pharmacy was all about and knew absolutely nothing about hospital pharmacy, but she offered a room and three meals a day if I worked the pharmacy department with her. Eventually we both graduated and I went to Chicago with the American Hospital Association and finally ended up at ASHP in 1960. Years later, Sister was elected to the board of directors of ASHP and, a few years later, was elected as the first female president of the ASHP. No matter where I went, she was there and it was fortunate for me that she was.

I was not at all. I really had very little exposure to pharmacy other than the local drug store in Canonsburg, Penn. on those rare occasions when we had to get some medications for the family. I really went to Duquesne to study music and was introduced to the dean of the school of music. Then our local parish priest, who is also a Duquesne graduate, suggested we visit the dean of the school of pharmacy, who was a good friend of his. He was kind enough to give me about 15 or 20 minutes, and I walked out of that office and said he was the man I wanted to study with. I still did not know what pharmacy was.

I was brought up in a household of Italian heritage. My parents were immigrants and had very little formal education but had an awful lot of good life experiences. I grew up with the belief that we are here on earth for some reason and somewhere in the course of our life on earth, things are revealed to us in terms of our purpose here. That is not to say I dispute the notion of career development and setting goals, but I always have strongly urged our residents to not rely on that avenue alone. If you have any belief in anything beyond this world, rely on the fact that you have to be alert and aware of the opportunities and look for that light that shines through at some point and says this is really where you are supposed to be.

Could you tell us about your family growing up and the contribution that your parents made?

My parents came here as young people, married in this country and then had four children. The first two unfortunately died at an early age and I was the third one, born against the recommendations of my mother’s physician. My brother and I both ended up in the health field. My parents encouraged us to always pursue studies and work hard. Furthermore, my father was a coal miner and I had worked around the coalmines and had a pretty good notion that I did not want to do that as a career. If we had any talents that came from our parents, then we had the duty and obligation to advance those talents and work for mankind.

I know my dad got up very early in the morning and headed for the coal mines at about 5 o’clock. He would take a little trolley underground for two or three miles. The coal was somewhere under the next city and he would be underground for six or seven hours and then come out of that awful environment and, day after day, just continue doing that. Those were courageous people, but I had enough exposure that I felt I wanted to do something different than that.

I think patience first and patience second and maybe patience third. I think being a good listener would be another thing and then setting good examples. There is nothing more powerful than setting a good example. It is such a simple thing. Just be good and let those people who are looking for guidance see that genuine thing.

Following the life of Sister Gonzales was a very strong influence on me. The dean of the school of pharmacy, Dean Muldoon, at Duquesne was a wonderful man. He was an example of goodness with a desire to help people, to teach, to guide students. In my senior year, we had a class called the dean’s hour. As my career has developed, I have forgotten most of what I learned formally, but I never forgot the dean’s hour where the dean talked about good things, good manners, being gracious, being sociable, how to act in public and on and on. We unfortunately don’t see much of those things nowadays, and yet they are the very things that make the difference long term.

One of the decisions I had made when I went to the university was that I did not want to study medicine. I felt I could not take responsibility for a person’s life. Yet I stumbled into pharmacy; I went to Duquesne to study music and ended up dealing with drugs that can take peoples’ lives or save them. It reinforces my belief that there is a certain amount of destiny in the world for all of us to deal with.

I do not think so. Again, my belief is that you take it as it comes and you keep looking for your place in life. You should not be concerned about the doors that close every once in awhile; look for those doors that are opening all the time so that you do not pass up an open door. I ended up in pharmacy school and, as a coincidence, ended up going to Chicago, and came to ASHP through coincidence. Those were not things I thought about in terms of a career development path at all. I was just doing one job at a time.

Things have changed dramatically from when I was a young pharmacist. We were taught about drugs- how to prepare drugs, how they were manufactured and the incompatibilities among drugs. Now, students deal with that aspect and are also involved with how drugs are used in a disease state. That is a whole different dimension and a whole different direction for the pharmacy today and the future. If I were to advise young pharmacists now, no matter where they are going to practice, I would tell them the important thing is to never give up on learning. Doing so keeps the doors open to all kinds of opportunities that exist today and others that will come along in the future. If you do not do that then I think that we revert to doing a job that is going to outpace us in terms of knowledge base very quickly. We would lose the opportunities that pharmacy presents.

If we did not have pharmacists, we would have to create somebody who is today doing what pharmacists are doing. We have the specialization of physicians to the extent that they are so narrow in what they treat that the overall knowledge concerning drugs is limited to a handful in their specialty as opposed to a broad knowledge of drugs as a whole. Pharmacists themselves are being challenged by all the information we have about drugs, how they act and the potential for good and for harm. We are developing an expert who is unique and needed; someone who is moving from knowledge of drugs only to this realm called clinical applications where we are dealing with drugs in the disease state. Who knows where that is going to take us? Breakthroughs are coming in medicine today so I see opportunity there. That knowledge can be applied in the industry. I see the community level evolving into something that can hopefully be more clinical rather than just distributive because the distribution can be handled in other ways. The clinical aspect is critical to patient care. We are not there now but there are movements in place. If we can ever get insurance coverage for the population as a whole, and get rid of insurance forms that now tie up a pharmacist’s practice level, I think we can concentrate purely on clinical application of drugs. This is possible and conceivable and we have to do everything in our power to make it happen, and I think it will happen!

The development of ASHP, what little role I had in that, I see as a highlight in my career in pharmacy. I believe things like the role we played in the development of the PharmD degree as the sole entry-level degree was very important. We finally got rid of the problems of what degree to give ourselves. When I was in pharmacy school, I graduated with a four-year Bachelor of Science degree. Now we are talking about a PharmD in six or seven years, but at least we have one degree and not a mixture. I think the development of the technician certification program is going to be major in how pharmacists function clinically in the future. When I first came on the scene we could not even talk about technicians; now they are an accepted part of the manpower that we need. That is a major key. I particularly like to think about JCPP, the joint commission of pharmacy practitioners. It was an initiative almost 30 years ago to bring pharmacy together in unification without threatening the existing organizations politically. All the attempts to unite into one organization ended up in failure because no one wants to give up their own identity. That next question was how to unify yet stay independent. JCPP was that initiative. Now 30 years later, JCPP is still in existence and nobody is threatened. Every quarter, the CEOs and the elective officials of the 10 or so organizations in JCPP come together. There is nothing more important than to sit across from a peer and respond to something we may have inadvertently done or said in that interim three-month period. That makes everybody a little more diplomatic, a little more conscious of what we say and how we express ourselves publicly. We have discovered that by meeting over and over and over again, quarter after quarter, we really do not have that many differences. We try to understand each other better and concentrate on our similarities and move the profession forward that way. So JCPP is one of the things I feel very good about.

We are at an age where speed seems to be everything - everything moves so fast. I’ve learned in my career that we do have to stop and listen to each other. We have to learn how to be patient without slowing down. Sometimes what seems to be a problem requiring immediate attention, given a little time, does not seem to be so problematic. I am not suggesting sitting back and letting things take their course, but we have a better opportunity to influence things when we have done proper reflection.

More from MentoringNOW

Back to Homepage