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18 inTeRview In part two of our series on the Masters of Irish Pharmacy June Shannon talked to the teaching legend – Ingrid Hook if you are an Irish pharmacist working in Ireland today chances are that you have been taught by Ms Ingrid Hook, who for the past 40 years has dedicated her career to the teaching of Pharmacognosy and the development of the School of Pharmacy at TCD. Ms Hook was born in what was then Czechoslovakia and grew up in Innsbruck, Austria. An only child, she followed her widowed mother to England at the age of eight. Despite a hugely difficult start to her new life in the UK – which included travelling alone to a strange country at the tender age of eight without a word of English – Ingrid went on to become a gifted and successful scholar. A love of science, especially botany, proved to be the stimulus for a hugely successful career in the subject area of pharmacognosy, the historic ‘roots’ of the pharmacy profession. Medicine’s loss… According to Ms Hook she originally wanted to study medicine but was put off by the length of time it took to qualify. Thankfully for the hundreds of Irish pharmacy students she went on to teach, Ms Hook instead opted for pharmacy, a choice that she said she never once lived to regret. Ms Hook qualified with a BSc (Pharm) at the UK Manchester University in 1965, where she specialised in Pharmacognosy. She did her preregistration year in the hospital pharmacy at Withington Hospital in Manchester. That had a “wonderful pharmacy. It was…a manufacturing pharmacy as well so I got exposure to the whole aseptic scene. We made ampoules… large volume parenterals, we also made a lot of ointments because there was a big skin clinic there…at that stage we had already started ward rounds so it was a big pharmacy and it really proved to me that hospital pharmacy was issue 10 volume 12 • novemBeR 2010 Ms INGrId Hook First woman Head of School of Pharmacy and teaching supremo my number one choice of direction,” Ms Hook explained. The 60s In 1966 she moved to Blackpool to try her hand at community pharmacy, or, in her own words: “I decided to check that I didn’t like community pharmacy”. After two years and satisfied that community pharmacy was not for her, Ingrid was appointed as a hospital pharmacist at Fulwood Hospital in Preston, lancashire. In 1969 Ingrid married the now well-known rugby pundit and broadcaster George Hook whom she had met in the UK. They both decided to return to live in Ireland but unfortunately at that time in Ireland there was no reciprocity for Ingrid’s UK Pharmacy degree and when she went to make enquires about practising here she learned that she would have had to repeat the entire three years. Almost by default therefore Ms Hook sought
issue 10 volume 12 • novemBeR 2010 out an alternative career path and in 1970 was lucky enough to be appointed lecturer in Pharmacognosy at what was then known as the College of the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland based in the headquarters of the PSI in Shrewsbury Road and administered by UCD. In 1977 administration of the Pharmacy College was transferred to TCD, although it was to be another 20 years before the School was transferred physically to a purpose built building on the main TCD campus at College <strong>Green</strong> in October 1997. In 1993 Ingrid was appointed Senior lecturer in Pharmacognosy at TCD and six years later became Head of the Department. FirsT woMan In 2003 Ms Hook became the first female head of the School of Pharmacy at TCD, a position to which she was elected by her peers, and she went on to successfully steer the School through what she described as a particularly difficult and challenging time. Ms Hook faced a myriad of difficulties on her appointment in 2003, chief of which was a significant staff shortage, especially in the areas of Pharmacy Practice and Pharmacology due to the very sudden and untimely death of Professor Graham Shaw, TCD’S highly respected Professor of Pharmacology and the early retirement of Mr Gordon Davis, Senior lecturer in Pharmacology. This took place against a backdrop of organisational, financial and administrative changes at TCD in July 2003, which resulted in the once separate departments of Pharmacognosy, Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Pharmaceutics, Pharmacology and the Centre for the Practice of Pharmacy, being amalgamated into one School of Pharmacy, within the Faculty of Science. Bologna declaraTion Staff retirements, accreditation issues and the imminent impact of the European Bologna Declaration – which called for the modularisation of higher education – made for a very busy and challenging time for the new Head of Pharmacy. The 1999 Bologna Declaration called for massive reforms to be introduced across all European higher education institutions so that all courses were compatible and comparable. This pan European ideal aimed to facilitate the integration of universities within Europe so that theoretically students would be able to move seamlessly between universities or different subject areas. Ms Hook was instrumental in the modularisation of the BSc Pharm degree in TCD, which was introduced in October 2007. “ “What saddens me is that the people who are actually losing out are what you now are calling the ‘end users’ i.e. the students.” During her five years as Head of School from 2003-2008, Ms Hook, together with all the School’s staff worked hard to successfully guide the pharmacy course through four accreditation visits by the PSI. Staff numbers were brought back to full complement and in July 2005 she was involved in the transfer of the School of Pharmacy from the Faculty of Science to what was seen as its more natural home in the Faculty of Health Sciences. TrouBle coMes in Threes! During Ms Hook’s tenure the School was also visited by three major disasters, which included, two major fires one in May 2004 and another in July 2006 and a major flood in January 2006. Reflecting on her time as Head of School Ms Hook stated that the biggest challenge was the staffing issues “because everything else worked from that point on.” If you had the staff you could have the course running but if you didn’t have the staff then obviously the staff in-house wouldn’t have been able to cope. Once we had the staff in place it meant then that we could continue with accreditation and allow the graduation of pharmacy students, she explained. In September 2009 Ms Hook retired following more than four decades in academic pharmacy in Ireland. However, like most highly committed and dedicated professionals she is still an amazingly busy woman for someone who is supposed to be retired. She continues to come to College three days a week as a visiting academic, still gives some lectures in Pharmacognosy to undergraduate and postgraduate students. She is also still involved in research and is a member of a number of high profile boards and institutions including the Irish Medicines Board (IMB), the Science Subcommittee of the Royal Dublin Society (RDS), and the Scientific Committee of the European Scientific Co operative on Phytotherapy. Ms Hook also serves as an expert member on the Herbal Medicines Sub-Committee of the IMB and a Pan European Working Party in Good Practice in Traditional Chinese Medicine Research in the Post-genomic era (GP-TCM) – a European Coordination Action project to inform best practice and harmonise research of the safety and efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine in EU member states. work/liFe Balance As a mother of three and grandmother of four Ms Hook told Irish Pharmacist that although she may have come to a career in academic pharmacy by default she never saw herself as a “true blue academic” and as a busy working mother she was “grateful” to academia for allowing her to strike a happy work/ life balance. According to Ms Hook, striking a good work/ life balance today is not so easy to achieve due to what she sees as a shift in emphasis in academia over the past decade from one which was very much teaching-oriented to today where the focus seems to be more on research, publications and research funding. “About ten years ago the whole emphasis in academia changed and it became very researchoriented where your whole career was based on the number of publications that you had, the type of publications, the amount of money that you brought in. Whereas when I was in academia inTeRview “ “About ten years ago the whole emphasis in academia changed … your whole career was [now] based on the number of publications that you had, the type of publications, the amount of money you brought in.” at the beginning…the emphasis was more on teaching, the students and student welfare and student ability…and your subject…we loved our subjects, we carried on with our research…the research that we were allowed to do was what we felt was relevant research. now I don’t think you have the same kind of choice.” sTudenTs losing ouT “What saddens me is that the people who are actually losing out are what you now are calling the ‘end users’ i.e. the students.” Ms Hook said that it was possible to learn to be a good teacher and that it was important to gain students’ respect and to be respectful of them. “you need to be available to them, you need to be able to answer their questions whenever they arise, you need to be able to give them the information in a format that they can understand at a level that they can understand with the background information that you can hand out to them. “ The Trinity academic added that teaching itself has changed very much over the past decade with technological advances and the advent of e-learning. “I don’t know whether it is going to make better pharmacists or better graduates,” she added. Asked what one piece of advice she would give to someone thinking of studying pharmacy she said that what she has always said to prospective students over the years was that pharmacy was a good comprehensive science-based education, that allows graduates to work in a wide range of areas from community to hospital to industry and journalism to name but a few. “I would always recommend it to somebody good at science because it gives you a very large number of opportunities.” Reflecting on a career spanning four decades during which hugely committed teachers like herself and Dr Des Corrigan dedicated their time to teaching and mentoring future generations of Irish pharmacists Ms Hook said “I hope we taught them well, that they had a good Trinity experience…and that we showed them that natural products still have a place in modern pharmacy.” 19
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