Pharmacy Leadership Award
Linda Gutenberg
Pharmacy Operations Lead
Heart Pharmacy Group
Victoria
In four decades of practice, pharmacist Linda Gutenberg has worked in nearly every role in community pharmacy.
She’s been on the frontlines, dispensing and providing clinical services — whether at the counter, in central fill pharmacies, or out in the community working directly with patients. She led more than 500 staff across dozens of stores as a director of pharmacy, while managing millions of dollars in medications, handling the logistics of individual pharmacies, and overseeing documentation, software changes and workflows. She has held leadership positions in advocacy bodies, working to advance the profession for thousands of pharmacists.
“My passion for pharmacy has never wavered. I want to help move the profession forward and remove barriers for implementation of new services and new scopes of practice. That continues to be my driving force today,” Gutenberg said.
She was earmarked for leadership early on. In one of her first roles as a pharmacy manager for the Strom Group on Vancouver Island, she was seen as a leader among other store managers, and she took a key role in providing strategy and direction for the group. When that group became part of the Rexall Pharmacy Group a few years later, Gutenberg was elevated to a Regional Pharmacy Manager position, overseeing 28 corporate stores in British Columbia. And in her next role, as Director of Pharmacy with Forewest Holdings Inc., she helped grow the group from nine stores to 37 stores — all the while still making time to work at the dispensary counter.
“Throughout my career, I have noticed different styles of leadership. I did not want to be the type of leader who is providing direction for what should be happening in pharmacies, while not being there in the stores,” she said.
“I think working alongside our team members in the pharmacy lends a different level of credibility. Whether I was a district manager or regional manager, I was still dispensing. I wanted to make sure I was experiencing all the changes and realities that our pharmacy teams experience.”
As Pharmacy Operations Lead at Heart Pharmacy Group. Linda Gutenberg supports about 125 staff members, among them pharmacists, nurses, home care aides, technicians and assistants.
In the past 40 years, the profession has changed a lot, and pharmacies are no longer seen as solely dispensaries of medication. In addition to leading pharmacy teams through changes to the profession, Gutenberg has always sought opportunities to be part of the change process.
Collectively, she has spent more than 13 years representing community pharmacists as a Director of the Board at the BC Pharmacy Association, including serving as its president from 2002 to 2003. Additionally, she served as the Deputy CEO of the Association from 2018 to 2019.
“When I went to school, we worked on the premise that the perfect world would be where the doctor diagnosed the condition, and the pharmacist decided which medication would be best for the patient, whether the dose needs to be altered, and monitoring the patient’s response to the physician’s diagnosis,” Gutenberg said.
“That vision was from 1986. Today, we have made progress but we’re still not quite there; and maybe what we have is a bit different from what we envisioned. We’re now able to diagnose on our own with minor ailments, and we can now adapt prescriptions and better determine what medication is going to be best for the patient.”
Currently, Gutenberg works as Pharmacy Operations Lead with the Heart Pharmacy Group, a group of nine pharmacies on Vancouver Island. Here, she serves as clinical lead for the group’s vaccine program, which provides tens of thousands of vaccines each year from Port Hardy to Victoria. Additionally, she supports about 125 staff members, among them pharmacists, nurses, home care aides, technicians and assistants.
Looking ahead, Gutenberg believes pharmacists should build upon the foundation of recent scope expansions, such as prescribing, by continuing to implement these services within community practice.
“We have a fantastic group of pharmacists who are all passionate about moving the profession forward. But many of us have different specialties or passions for one area of practice or the other,” she said.
“My role is to help figure out what area of pharmacy practice each of our staff are most passionate about, and help them channel their passion by removing any barriers that are stopping them from doing that.”
One strategy Gutenberg has adopted to deliver a more effective vaccine campaign is by utilizing changes, implemented by B.C. government in 2022, that enabled pharmacies to claim PharmaCare’s administration fee for vaccines administered by nurses. This change allowed Gutenberg to free up her pharmacists during the busy vaccine season.
“A question that came up was, how do we find nurses that want to work shifts inside a pharmacy? Fortunately, we had a network of nurses in our daily medication management program, and we worked with them to identify colleagues who wanted to supplement their hours at the hospital or in long-term care,” she said.
“This past year is the third year we have had nurses administering vaccines. We did about 65,000 vaccines among our nine stores.”
Looking ahead, she believes pharmacists should build upon the foundation of recent scope expansions, such as prescribing, by continuing to implement these services within community practice. She said pharmacists should also keep an eye on the horizon for plausible future services based on the changing health-care landscape.
“For example, pharmacists now have the authority to order lab tests, but the payment model for that has not been established. We are thinking about it now, because once we do have a payment method, we want to be ready to go,” Gutenberg said.
She also remains optimistic that British Columbia will adopt electronic-prescribing. B.C. remains one of the only places in Canada which has not adopted e-prescribing, in which prescribers send prescriptions directly from their electronic records to the pharmacy.
“I was involved in a committee to implement e-prescribing in 2005 and there was a strong willingness to have it happen, but unfortunately there were too many problems with implementation at the time,” Gutenberg said.
“I think the topic is now resurfacing and I’m excited at the potential of having it be implemented in B.C. and what it will mean for our pharmacy teams. I would love to see that happen here, certainly before I retire.”