Ego and pride can manifest in pharmacists and patients but it is avoidable, writes Áine Mac Grory
“You’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you.” I love this lyric.
Whenever Carly comes on, I smirk. I think we all do. We all know someone who thinks that song is about them.
You see it during a sing-song, pints in hand, swaying, and shouting along with passion. “I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee”!
Well, I’m not Carly Simon, and this is not a sing-song, but I bet there are people who think this article is about them (don’t you?).
It’s been a week. Honestly? It’s been a MONTH laced with professional humiliation (I bet Free HRT Scheme thinks this is about them).
My professional counterparts and I took a knock to our confidence. It is not a nice thing to sit with, feeling blindsided.
It has taken me years of proactive and purposeful practice to fine-tune this skill. The skill of sitting with the discomfort of being humbled or wrong.
Accepting that someone else knows more about what they are talking about than I do. Even worse, being humbled by someone who draws a more logical conclusion on something Ishould know more about.
When this skill is fully polished, it also makes it impossible not to spot the people who clearly don’t have it (but desperately need to).
God knows, if there is one thing pharmacy seems to be excellent at these days, it’s welcoming stuff… so let’s welcome embracing the skill of practicing humility while we are at it? Not to be confused with the practice of humiliating (others). We have Joe Duffy for that.
Speaking of humility — back to ME and MY month.
Intentional or not, ego can creep in unannounced in every aspect of your life. This month, mine snuck in through the back and interfered with many work scenarios that could have done without its contribution.
It didn’t present in the form of chest-beating bravado. It showed itself via the assumptions I made, the things I forgot to explain, or indeed took for granted. I’m sure we are all a bit guilty of silently deciding that we know best and that others will just catch up.
I take comfort in the fact that I am willing to admit it and at the very least, these scenarios provide great content for all those classic interview questions we love to answer — see below.
The Questions
Describe a situation where things didn’t go as planned, and how you dealt with it?
(Ego kicking me under the table. You want me to tell you about a time where I made a mistake? Excuse me, mistake? Moi?)
I truly despise that question and must stop myself from asking the interviewer to simply give me the list of questions and leave it with me. ‘I could do a much better job if you just let me do it myself.’
What’s next on this list? What are your strengths and weaknesses? (Responds with eyes to sky because cursing during an interview is frowned upon – trust me on that one.)
Strength? Why loads of course, obviously I am perfect – sorry I mean, I am a perfectionist – strength and weakness.
Attention to detail – like you wouldn’t believe, baby. Often to complete overkill. Weakness when this skill is not reigned in.
Micromanaging? Subtle in my case, Mr Interviewer. You probably didn’t notice – too distracted by me taking the pen and paper from your hands while escorting you out of the room so I can takeover.
Excellent skill to have if you really want your team to think you have no faith in their capabilities.
Can you give me an example of how these traits affect your ability to work as part of a team? (Give me strength — literally — I hate this question too.)
Unfortunately, this month has ample examples of this.
One of note occurred during a discussion with my dispensing assistant. I was showing them where to place the dispensing labels on a medicine box, a task that seemed so mundane to me I struggled to appreciate the fact that it wasn’t automatically assumed.
I pointed to the site of choice and moved on, but they interrupted me before I could and asked, “Why there?” The question gave me pause. I hadn’t thought to explain.
Wasn’t it obvious? Not over any critical text, out of the way of expiry date while being directly in line with the drug name and strength for ease of label to box-check off. But then I remembered why I’d always chosen that exact spot.
When I was 23, just starting out, my tutor once stopped me as I was labelling a box of aspirin.
“Don’t cover the braille!” she said. “I don’t know how to read it, and I don’t know if this patient does either, but why risk it?”
That kind of reverence for patient empowerment wherever possible stayed with me.
I adopted the habit and never thought any more about it.
But how was my assistant supposed to know why that placement mattered to me?
When I explained it, they looked again at the box and said, “Wow… now that I see it, I can’t unsee it.”
It was a comment made with a mix of irony and insight, whether they intended the pun or not, it landed.
Another example…
The interviewer is pushing their luck now. I’m a very busy lady, but okay, I will oblige them with one more.
It started with a patient who came in, my standard and repeated battle over phased dispensings, collection dates and times.
One of many, and something I am truly sad to say, I have had years of experience dealing with.
Angry, disgruntled and manipulative patient cohorts are my pharmacy bread and butter.
So, there I was on the phone with the local GP who I had been desperately trying to get in touch with, and of course enter patient X at that exact moment.
They start screaming bloody murder at the counter. Nothing to see here folks, just your standard attack of emotional dysregulation.
I paused my phone call and advised that the gardaí would be called if they didn’t leave. They refused to leave, so I instructed the team members to call the gardaí and carry about their business.
I ended the call and tuned back in to the meltdown occurring at the counter. Blood? Screams? Tears?
“What’s patient X after doing now?”
How on earth did she get her hands on those scissors?
Great, now we need to call an ambulance and deal with a blood spill.
What are the team members doing? Why are they still standing near the patient? “Get in the back NOW!”
They snapped out of their frazzled states and removed themselves from the danger zone.
What I considered manageable, mundane and at most, inconvenient, had shaken them.
It was clear to me at that moment that I had taken them for granted and made assumptions about their capabilities without making sure they had been taught them, resulting in lengthy incident reports, team briefings, and an immediate update to security procedures.
The whole situation took hours of time and emotional energy — theirs and mine.
So focused I was on getting a win for a patient (and the satisfaction that comes with that for me), I let that goal interfere with my consideration for my team members and their needs.
And in the centre of it all was a quiet, unacknowledged assumption: Because I was okay, everyone else must be too. When you have been held up at gunpoint and threatened with a dirty unsheathed needle, what’s a bit of shouting and a superficial performative cutting?
That was ego. It wasn’t loud or malicious. It was subtle, unspoken, and crucially, avoidable.
Please remove your ego before entering
Ego shows up in patients too, though not in the ways we typically expect. I’ve had patients nod through counselling, clutching prescription bags with apparent understanding, only to return later having taken the wrong dose or missed critical instructions.
They weren’t careless. They were proud, or ashamed. And I hadn’t picked up on it. I assumed.
We ask patients to tell us when they don’t understand, but do we make it safe for them to do so?
Have we created a space where someone can say, ‘I can’t read’ or ‘Could you explain that again, I didn’t get that’ without fearing embarrassment?
What appears to be non-compliance is, in fact, pride. And have we as healthcare providers made enough room for it?
I have always wondered what healthcare would look like if ego was a physical object we carried around. Something tangible. Accessories we could remove when not immediately needed. Think phone, wallet, keys tossed at the hallway entrance table along with the loose change weighing down your pockets.
What if we could leave them outside the door before entering a room, before stepping into a difficult discussion, before delivering feedback or listening to criticism?
What would patient outcomes be if pride wasn’t part of policy-making? If ego didn’t dilute difficult conversations among healthcare professionals? Would collaboration replace competition? Would safety improve? Would decisions serve the patient rather than the system, or the individual’s reputation?
There’s a reason pride is considered a deadly sin — not because self-worth is bad, but because when pride becomes protective, when it becomes untouchable, it stops us from learning, adapting, apologising or even listening.
That idea didn’t fully land with me until I thought about pride in the context of healthcare. When I applied it to the patient who didn’t tell me they couldn’t read, or the colleague who didn’t say they felt unsafe, I saw it clearly. Pride doesn’t always roar — sometimes it silences. But it’s important not to conflate everything. Confidence, ego, arrogance, and pride often wear similar masks, but they are not the same. Confidence is built — often slowly.
It’s forged through experience, reflection, mistakes, recovery, and time. It comes after sacrificing ego and swallowing pride. It’s what’s left standing after you’ve faced failure and still show up the next day, ready to learn again. Ego and arrogance, on the other hand, are precious and fragile. They are stroppy teenagers or tantrummy toddlers. They rely on getting their own way. They resist scrutiny. They loath being wrong.
But confidence? Confidence says: ‘I don’t know yet, but I will.’ It listens. It absorbs. It shares.
And most importantly, it lifts others instead of needing to stand taller than them.
Last month forced a hard look in the mirror. Not just at policies or procedures, but at me. My assumptions. My blind spots. My ego.
But it also reinforced something hopeful. The problems ego creates are preventable. Those small reflections, on label placements, on difficult patient interactions, on missed emotional cues; they can make us better.
Not just better healthcare professionals, but better leaders.
There are mixed views on what defines good leadership when it comes to representing pharmacists, and, as I am bound by a word count, I will hold off on that commentary until next month’s article. Until then reader, have you figured out if this current one is about you?
I can confirm that it is. And It’s about me. And It’s about pretty much anyone who has ever had to deal with embarrassment, shame or pride.
I’ll leave it there, for now. There’s a match starting at 14:00 and I have some parochial pride to get out of my system!
