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 excluding 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 multifaceted process in which 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 health care professionals to fulfill the covenantal relationship with their patients. As a result, pharmacists, including academic pharmacists, often prioritize their work over themselves. In academic pharmacy, the downstream effects include not only detrimental impacts on personal well-being but also potential modeling of these behaviors to learners during their formative years of PIF, thereby perpetuating a broader culture of burnout in the profession. The purpose of this commentary is to explore how PIF may contribute to pharmacist hesitancy to place personal well-being at the forefront, specifically for academic pharmacists. Additionally, the commentary suggests that PIF represents a missed opportunity to examine this tension between self-care and service with our students. To address this, 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.