Binghamton University’s Eric Richards has practiced pharmacy for almost 50 years. Here’s what he’s learned

Eric Richards, a clinical assistant professor and the experiential education co-coordinator, joined the Binghamton University School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences in summer 2023, bringing with him almost five decades of pharmacy experience.

Even after all these years, he hasn’t lost his love for the practice.

Q: What got you first interested in pharmacy and the idea of working in this field?

When I was growing up, I had a childhood illness: rheumatic fever and pericarditis. So I was in the doctor’s office a lot. And it was a small town. So the doctor’s office was in a building in a converted home just a block from where I lived. I had to get every other day injections for rheumatic fever. I became really good acquaintances and friends with the physician. Then I had two siblings growing up that developed illnesses. One had a chronic condition and one had a sudden onset of a disease. Both died during childhood when I was growing up. I always thought about getting into medicine in some way. Honestly, I thought about being a physician, but when I was in high school, I couldn’t envision that my career was only half over and then I would have that many more years of schooling. Someone suggested pharmacy to me because it has a similar path. I went to pharmacy school on that suggestion, fell in love with it and don’t regret a minute of it. So now the rest is history…a long history.

Q: How long have you been in this field?

Let me see, almost 50 years.

Q: So in that half century, how have you seen pharmacy change?

So certainly, one of the biggest, obvious changes is patients. Even before the internet, patients have become more and more educated and knowledgeable about their disease. And their drugs. That’s probably the most remarkable thing to me. When I first started practicing pharmacy, believe it or not, pharmacists weren’t even required by law to put the drug name on a prescription bottle label. And many, many of us did that. But it was not a requirement. Some doctors would specifically write on the prescription “Do not identify” or “Do not label” and you know, a lot of patients early on, couldn’t tell you what medication they were on.

As laws and regulations changed and required that more information be shared with patients, patients also started to belong to support groups. They started having guest speakers come in to talk to them specifically about their diseases. I did a lot of public speaking before and after the internet and patients’ knowledge about their specific disease just exploded and surprised me. So a lot of times they would know more about their disease than I knew and I was, you know, this educated health professional. That’s because, for some people, their diseases are debilitating. It consumes their lives. They spend most of their spare time looking for relief from the symptoms and trying to improve their quality of life. So anytime I did public speaking with support groups, I usually walked away learning something from them. And that’s very, very rewarding and enlightening.

Q: Over the five decades, how have you seen yourself change as a pharmacist or grow?

I think one of the things a pharmacist is asked to do is commit to being a lifelong learner and to continue to have a certain amount of intellectual curiosity about learning more about the profession that you’re in. I think for me, it’s kind of that quest or thirst for knowledge and medicine in general pharmacy more specifically. We’re constantly developing new therapies and a lot of it’s really hard to keep up with. I mean, there are more than 50,000 drugs on the market and nobody can know everything about those drugs. And so, sometimes you have to almost specialize and look at what kinds of things your contribution is going to be as a profession and it takes many different forms. You could be a specialist in cardiovascular disease or diabetes, or, in my case, I had always been a pharmacy leader.

Toward the end of my working career here, I was the director of a very large hospital with 80 employees. So probably the last 10 years of the journey that I’ve been on have been spent leading other people and helping develop pharmacy students. I had 80 employees and I was helping them be the best version of themselves. My profession migrated more toward leadership and leading others, helping them to be successful.

Q: You’ve also been a preceptor. For anyone who doesn’t know, would you mind explaining what a preceptor is?

A preceptor is a pharmacist who’s already licensed in the field. And they agree to precept, or mentor, students. So it’s part mentoring, part teaching, there are different components of being a preceptor, but the preceptors supervise pharmacy students, usually through a structured experiential program. It’s a requirement for licensure, it’s a requirement to graduate that students have a certain amount of hours towards graduation within a precepted environment where they have specific assignments, and it gives them exposure to the field of pharmacy and the practice of pharmacy.

It’s really the first time that students are sent out into the environment so they can see what happens in community pharmacies and what happens in institutional pharmacies. And that’s done after a couple of years of pharmacy school. It’s all about actually teaching these students how to start thinking and acting and feeling like a pharmacist so that when they graduate, they’re fully functioning pharmacists.

Q: So it has to be a pretty rewarding feeling as a preceptor to know that you’re helping the next generation of pharmacists?

Yes, and it’s part of the pharmacist oath to give back and to help apply our skills and our knowledge and the training of future pharmacists. And even before this became a part of the oath, it has always been true for most pharmacists. They hold it very dear to their profession, that somebody helped them become a pharmacist and get the training and do the internships. Most of them feel a professional obligation to give that back and pay it forward for the next generation of pharmacists.

Q: How does it feel to see students that you’ve worked with and see them thriving in this field partially thanks to you?

There’s nothing like it. I’ve always been passionate about precepting and teaching. Not everybody has that same level of passion, but it’s just very personally rewarding and certainly adds to the profession and adds to a feeling of self-worth. It gives me a certain amount of pride that I’ve, in some small way, helped these students develop into the preceptors that they are today, and to watch them blossom and grow and then become fully functioning pharmacists and contributing and giving back, it’s a great feeling for sure.