Volunteer service strengthens pharmacists’ empathy, confidence, and communication, boosting patient trust, teamwork, and community connection.
We often hear about, implicitly recognize the importance of, or occasionally participate in service. Service is context-dependent. It could be an official duty, such as someone committed to an elected post or to a branch of the military. In this regard, we think of service as noble. The service performed by a pharmacist is part of their professional responsibility. For the purposes of this article, service is conceptualized as voluntary, unpaid acts or behavior that may or may not pertain directly to your profession.
On the surface, a trip to the pharmacy for a patient can appear only transactional. However, the service being provided is greater than any discrete number of transactions. Underwriting every service at the pharmacy is some degree of confidence and trust in the pharmacy afforded by the patient. Hepler described this as a professional and covenantal relationship, stating that “the very reason for the existence of any profession is to serve the public interest, under a covenant.”1
Health care made available at pharmacies fundamentally engages pharmacists, interns, technicians, and clerks who operate there with service-oriented relationships as they field requests of patients, caregivers, and other clients. To uphold their end of the relationship, pharmacy staff depend on skills needed to maintain a positive developmental trajectory toward the good health of the patient over time. This encompasses many skills, including those that can be learned and refined through the practice of service to others. To that end, both the practitioner and the patient benefit from the accrual of such skills, emotions, and behaviors acquired from serving others.2
Some questions, then, are which skills and how does serving others outside of pharmacy develop them in ways that formal education cannot always fully replicate?
The most important skills are not necessarily the most technical ones. They are interpersonal: empathy, active listening, composure under pressure, adaptive communication, and the ability to meet a person exactly where they are. These are the qualities that determine whether a patient leaves a pharmacy encounter feeling cared for versus having been processed as a transaction. And they are forged most reliably through sustained, human-centered service in the real world.
There is a reason that some of the many effective pharmacists trace their instincts not to a particular didactic laboratory experience but to years spent in customer-facing roles, such as food pantries and volunteer clinics. In other words, community organizations where there was no grade attached and no institutional net beneath them.
This is no longer an argument made only on intuition. A 2022 study found that service-learning experiences produced significant improvements in both empathy and self-efficacy among pharmacy students.3 The significance of that pairing cannot be overstated. Empathy without confidence produces hesitation at the counter. Confidence without empathy produces a pharmacist who is technically accurate but functionally dispassionate. Data suggest service learning builds both skills simultaneously.
A 2023 systematic review of 92 studies examined learning outcomes from student-run health clinics and found consistent gains across empathy, clinical confidence, and interprofessional teamwork.2 These are not peripheral competencies. They are precisely what determines how a pharmacist performs when the situation is complicated, the patient is vulnerable, and the system is not cooperating.
Yet, service cannot and is not confined to strictly professional encounters. Much evidence points to service learning not only for students but even to reflective adults enhancing their skills.4 Shantz and Dempsey-Brench point out that although skills-based volunteering involves direct application of job-related expertise, traditional volunteer activities (eg, serving at a soup kitchen or planting trees) also tend to foster general competencies.5 Even further, it is not a stretch to imagine how serving as the treasurer for your homeowner’s association enhances your financial literacy and your organization skills; how being an active member of your local Rotary International affiliate provides you a greater understanding of those in need and how public and private sectors might intersect; or how chairing a committee for the parent teacher association will evoke humility, decision-making, delegation, and communication skills.6
Although one should not volunteer only for the express purposes of skills development, taking the opportunity to engage in service presents many opportunities for growth. It also provides greater exposure to persons of all walks of life: not only the people you are serving but even your fellow volunteers, who might be laborers, accountants, attorneys, supply chain managers, sales representatives, or homemakers. It enlivens the intellectual arena to get to know or at least talk with people whose occupations vary so considerably from yours. It provides an opportunity for networking in ways that you might not first realize.
George Nicholson and Ikenna Ezejiaku are PharmD candidates at the Touro University California College of Pharmacy.
Shane Desselle, RPh, PhD, is a professor of social and behavioral pharmacy at the Touro University California College of Pharmacy.
One co-author of this paper recently attended a morning coffee sponsored by a local Chamber of Commerce. There he met an insurance broker who offered to help teach financial literacy to his students and another who was showcasing opportunities to host an international student, which interested him and his wife. And of course, it is good for the profession if the greater community gets to see pharmacists and technicians more tightly woven into the fabric of our communities.
So, do it for the right reasons, of course, but hopefully the reader here might give some pause and further consideration to putting themselves out there to engage in service and volunteerism for their own good and for the good of their patients and everyone around them.
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