Farzan (middle), Anthony Miller (second from the left) and the pharmacy team, including co-op students.
Farzan Dadfar (BScPhm’13, PharmD’19) is the 2020 School of Pharmacy Alumni Achievement Award recipient. Farzan manages NKS Health, a unique pharmacy in the Greater Toronto Area which provides specialized therapies for chronic autoimmune conditions. He joined the NKS team right out of pharmacy school.
“I was drawn to their specialized practice area,” he says. “The idea that I could continuously grow to become an expert in a specific therapeutic area and dig deep into optimizing care for patients appealed to me.”
The pharmacy focuses on specialized treatments like biologics or toxin preparations for chronic conditions. These treatments are primarily formulated as injectables or infusion drug treatments and have unique considerations in terms of reimbursement, financial assistance, laboratory monitoring, cold chain management and more.
After a year as a staff pharmacist, Farzan knew he was interested in leadership opportunities. He transitioned to a management role where he develops and optimizes pharmacy processes and builds and supports his team.
“NKS leadership has always been visionary and ambitious,” Farzan says. “They place a high emphasis on patient care, experience and service. I wanted to be part of that vision and help to operationalize those concepts.”
That leadership piece has pushed him to continue to refine NKS’ services and patient experience.
“I learned that optimizing care for each patient means more than becoming a clinical expert,” he says. ‘It means having to work with those around me to provide a complete patient experience by strengthening our operations.”
Farzan has become an expert in a highly specialized area of pharmacy, and he shares that knowledge in several ways: he is involved in creating training modules for pharmacists across Canada to implement quality injection and infusion services, and he is a regular co-op employer.
“By taking on the responsibility of sharing this knowledge with my peers and colleagues, I was pushed to gain a deeper understanding of these concepts to make sure I’m providing others with accurate and credible information,” he says. “I look forward to focusing more on education and mentorship in the years ahead.”
“When I was a co-op pharmacy student, I had mentors and leaders that really helped me to excel and grow, both professionally and personally,” he says. “It was important to me to be able to give back to the program and the profession and to provide an opportunity for the new generation to come experience working at our organization.”
Farzan has taken sharing his expertise one step further, participating as an expert on numerous advisory boards and public panels for biologic therapies. He is currently pursuing his MBA at the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management with an aim to further refining his leadership and management skills.
Farzan is the fourth recipient of the annual School of Pharmacy Alumni Achievement Award. Read more about previous winners and award today!