Young Leader in Pharmacy Donna Mbamy-Conci: "I always envisioned that I would be an advocate."
Snapshot:
Education
Fourth Year Pharmacy Student (Class of 2023) Dalhousie University College of Pharmacy
Second Year Law Student (Class of 2025) Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law
Current roles
Student Board of Director with the Pharmacists of Nova Scotia Association
President of the Dalhousie Student Pharmacy Society
Vice President of the Dalhousie Black Law Student Association
Co-President of the Dalhousie Christian Legal Fellowship
Student Pharmacist at Shoppers Drug Mart in Halifax
What excites you about being a pharmacist?
I am excited to be a healthcare provider patients can trust and feel safe with. It is a privilege to dispense medications that preserve, enhance, and save people’s lives.
My journey in pharmacy began when I was 12 years old and started working in a pharmacy. I also watched my mother work as pharmacist, and she inspired me to pursue this amazing profession. Seeing the love and joy that she has from caring for patients makes very excited to finally reach this milestone. I am excited that 10 years later I am about to reach my dream of becoming a pharmacist. With my unique career path, I also am excited to see how my legal profession will enhance my pharmacy practice.
When you graduated, what did you envision for your future?
As a child, my father and I shared a dream of me becoming a lawyer until he passed away when I was 11 years old. My love for pharmacy grew as a teenager and I followed in my mother’s footsteps into the pharmacy profession. I always envisioned that I would be an advocate for patients' and healthcare workers' rights. This vision grew while I was in pharmacy school, as I saw many inequities and discriminatory incidents within the healthcare field. I soon realized that to truly fight for justice, I needed a larger platform.
This prompted me to apply to law school while in my second year of pharmacy. I was accepted into the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University but still had passion for practising pharmacy. This empowered me to pursue both degrees at the same time, and I started third-year pharmacy and first-year law school concurrently.
I successfully completed 56.6 course credits and 10 classes per semester between pharmacy and law last year. To provide perspective, a full-time university course load is usually 30 credits per year with five classes per semester. This challenging feat showed me how important faith, determination, courage and passion were to be successful. As a future pharmacist and lawyer, my goal is to uphold justice, enforce equity and uplift the lives of others.
As a dynamic leader in the profession, what continues to drive you?
A key driving factor is that I am entering the pharmacy profession as our scope of practice is growing nationally. Pharmacists are a key intervention to alleviate the pressure on our healthcare system with patients lacking family physicians, specialists or regular prescribers. Our specialized knowledge in pharmacotherapy is a gem to the patients we serve each day. It is exciting that I will soon be able to prescribe medications, provide specialized assessments such as INR testing, and collaborate with more healthcare professionals.
What advice would you give to new pharmacy graduates?
Feel comfortable to step out into new and unique areas of our profession. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. To fuel your pharmacy career, it important to work in an area that you love and are passionate about. No dream is too big to achieve; my story is an illustration of this!