Celebrating our 2024 award winners

The pharmacists who volunteer to review and rank the entries to our annual Pharmacy Practice + Business Awards often tell me that it's an honour to be asked to serve as a judge. However, when it's all over, those same people also often comment that it was a more challenging  task than they expected. That's because the level of excellence, innovation and exceptional care among Canadian pharmacy professionals continues to increase.

Again this year, more than 50 individuals or teams entered or were nominated for an award in one of our seven award categories. Our panel of six judges reviewed all entries and were asked to rate each entry by three judging criteria (innovation, contribution to the community and impact). 

This year's panel of six judges included: Jim Danahy, Naushin Hooda, Ashwin Juneja, Jaclyn Katelnikoff, Graham MacKenzie and Fairuz Siraj. We are so grateful to them for taking the task seriously and devoting hours of their time to reviewing and ranking each entry. The entries with the highest total scores in each category were declared the winners.

This year's winners include: a high-profile pharmacist owner, association leader and vocal advocate for the profession; a pharmacy technician who used technology to come up with a simple, elegant solution to  a common pharmacy workflow and patient safety problem; an indigenous-owned pharmacy collective that showed up for their community in a crisis; a specialty pharmacy that's committed to enabling more patients to access rare and complex medications, even from other pharmacies and a young pharmacist; a pharmacist and educator who is passionate about the pharmacist's role in minor ailment care and so invented a system for making that care frictionless; and a young pharmacist who has wasted no time in showing leadership in enabling full scope of practice among her banner's members while also leading the way in ensuring more vulnerable people have access to vaccines.

We congratulate all of this year's winners and hope you'll be inspired by their stories, which you can read on our awards page.

Who's next?

It's never too early to think about entering the Pharmacy Practice + Business Awards.  If reading these stories makes you think of someone you know who’s deserving of an award (including perhaps, yourself?), you can sign up to be notified when the entry process opens for 2025 by filling out this form.