Balancing professional responsibilities and personal well-being through the lens of professional identity formation in academic pharmacy

Self-care and pharmacist burnout have been at the forefront of pharmacy workforce issues over the last decade and beyond, not precluding academic pharmacists. The academy has concurrently advocated for the well-being of academicians and learners alike while embracing professional identity formation (PIF) as a central tenet of what it means to be a pharmacist. PIF involves a multi-faceted process where individuals learn and change by adopting core knowledge, skills, values and beliefs of a specific profession resulting in the individual thinking, behaving and feeling like a member of that profession. PIF fosters a critical sense of responsibility in healthcare professionals to fulfill the covenantal relationship with our patients. As a result, pharmacists, including academic pharmacists, often prioritize their work over themselves. In academic pharmacy, the downstream effects include not only detrimental well-being impacts for the self, but also potential modeling to learners during their formative years of PIF, thereby continuing a broader culture of burnout in our profession. The purpose of this commentary is to explore how PIF may contribute to pharmacist hesitancy to put personal well-being in the forefront, specifically for academic pharmacists. Additionally, the commentary suggests PIF is also a missed opportunity to explore this tension between self-care and service with our students. In order to do so, we as academicians need to develop and model healthy boundaries and sustainable career practices. These changes could influence academic pharmacy culture and create a healthy pharmacy profession for future generations.