Allison Nourse
Allison Nourse
Assistant Director, Pharmacists Clinic
Profile submitted by: Charity Grey
Brief description of role or responsibilities
When Allison was assistant Director of the Pharmacists Clinic, she was responsible for operational leadership of the Clinic team, strategic planning, external partnerships, health technology, mentoring students and developing the future innovation agenda. She particularly oversaw the maintenance of existing health technology, improvements to current health technology, intercommunication with other pharmacists in the PCN program, and phasing in and out of these projects for the Clinic and the University.
One of her most important roles was collaborating with the First Nations Health Authority Health to support access to culturally safe pharmacy services and piloting new processes and technology with the Ministry of Health and Provincial Health Services Authority.
Describe how the individual or team made a positive contribution to patient care or their pharmacy department:
My job at the Clinic was my first corporate position, and there was a lot of anxiety on my end. I had high expectations of myself to perform well and be accountable with the roles and responsibilities given to me.
Allison not only prepared me with Lunch and Learn workshops, one-on-one meetings, resources and learning opportunities but also gave me the flexibility and space to go above and beyond in my work at the Clinic. I not only was able to support the transition of all OSCAR queries to preserve patient anonymity, but also document and revisit these important queries, processes and data structures to ensure correctness of data and reporting tools. analyzed OSCAR database tables to collaborate and communicate with the pharmacists.
In this position, I was able to validate and correct all 40+ existing reports to better align with their intended purpose. I also documented the entire pharmacist/automated data collection workflow within OSCAR and mapped it out into a schema diagram for future reference. Allison continued to advocate for my learning, even offering me the opportunity to go to the OSCAR Electronic Medical Record conference, where I was able to gain a broader understanding of medical software at large and also take home skills and perspectives to work at the clinic. Her trust in my ability allowed me to confidently explore learning without feeling like I was behind in my role, and she was always there during our check-ins to prioritize the pharmacists and their goals ultimately, helping guide our informatics projects towards providing the best care and knowledge for patients.
It is this knowledge of databases that allowed me to eventually participate in projects such as redesigning how our Pharmacists Clinic tracked Drug-Therapy-Problems, engaging in meetings to discuss the underlying data architecture of OSCAR. I even made several presentations and UI prototypes (along with their respective data structures), presenting to the pharmacist students and staff at the clinic for this project to spark more conversation about the redesign.
To this day, Allison continues to have conversations with me about what it means to be accountable with your responsibilities, and she continues to inspire me in learning how I can contribute and have value/impact in my career.