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This year we’ll be celebrating our 125th birthday! We’re planning a big celebration in Kelowna in September - stay tuned for more details. I hope that you’ll be able to join us.
Pharmacy has changed almost completely since that time. The practice is different, the drugs are different, the public that we serve is different…the whole world has changed. Some things haven’t changed though. We are still a recognized profession that serves as the drug and drug therapy expert to society.
I remember when we celebrated our 100th birthday in 1989. I was the President of the College, working at Lions Gate Hospital, and had mostly black hair! Pharmacy practice has changed a lot even since then. There was no such thing as a MAB or a NIB, even the ARBs were new on the scene. We were still using first and second generation cephalosporins, and there were few drugs available to treat HIV, hepatitis, and MRSA.
PharmaCare paid for pretty much any drug that was prescribed, whether it was brand name or generic. Insulin was either beef or pork in origin. Cimetidine was a revolutionary new drug! There were no drugs available to treat MS or thrombolytics for heart attacks. The College moved into our current building, and we were just starting to talk about the need for a provincial PharmaNet system to replace the manual drug profiles that were used to keep track of the drugs that patients were using. Generic substitution wasn’t happening much, and hospital pharmacists were just getting established in the patient care areas of acute care hospitals.
Over the 125 years, we have had 20 Registrars and 97 Presidents or Board Chairs.
We have a lot to be thankful for. Pharmacy has thrived in many ways. The first recorded pharmacist listed in the College register was J.M. Atkins. Due to a lack of information provided at that time, it’s hard to tell how many pharmacists we had in that first year. Between 1891 and 1927 there were 525 pharmacists listed in the register.
Now we have 6647 pharmacists, 1890 pharmacy technicians, and 1357 pharmacies in the province! Pharmacists continue to be the most accessible health professional. Providing drugs and drug therapy advice to patients. Many pharmacists do not dispense drugs at all, and instead offer clinical pharmacy services to patients and other health professionals.
We’ve come a long way. I wonder what the next 125 will look like!
Best,
Bob
- Registrar
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