As many of our members know, BC Pharmacy Association Chief Executive Officer Geraldine Vance will be leaving her position in November 2026.
For the past 14 years, Geraldine has led the Association with grace, care and strength, serving as a tireless advocate for community pharmacists and pharmacy in British Columbia.
Under her leadership, BCPhA has strengthened its voice as a trusted advocate for community pharmacy, helping advance pharmacists' role in patient care and supporting meaningful scope expansion across the province. Her ability to foster strong relationships with government, private insurers, community pharmacy groups, public health and other health professions cannot be overstated.
When Geraldine joined the Association in 2012, health care in the province looked very different. Pharmacists as a profession had recently received injection authority, and the Association was already positioning itself as a partner in embracing the new scope by developing its injection training program, which has now trained more than 5,500 pharmacists.
And just four short years after her appointment, B.C. suddenly found itself gripped by a toxic drug crisis. Thanks to the relationship she had cultivated with government and public health, Geraldine led the Association to position pharmacists as part of the solution to the crisis through harm reduction efforts like opioid agonist treatment services.
With barely a pause, the health-care system in the province found itself facing another hurdle: COVID-19. Once again, this was a significant challenge. Geraldine saw this as yet another opportunity for pharmacists to step up. Soon, pharmacists were at the helm of public health’s immunization efforts, a role that was so successful that in years after, pharmacists were granted authority to administer a greater variety of medications by injection.
As lessons from the pandemic emerged, she again seized the opportunity to demonstrate the value of pharmacists in the provision of primary care. And the government listened, expanding pharmacists’ scope to include prescribing authority for minor ailments, lab test ordering, increasing the breadth of pharmacist adaptations, and extending the timeframe during which pharmacists could renew prescriptions.
Even now as I write this, government continues to look at ways pharmacist scope can be further expanded, whether in the area of additional minor ailments, or as we hope, expanding pharmacy services into chronic disease management and publicly funded point-of-care testing.
It will not be easy to fill her shoes. To help identify candidates, the Association is opening a search for a new Chief Executive Officer, details of which you will find here.
Interested applicants should email their cover letter and resume to info@hummingbee.ca before Aug. 28, 2026.