My name is Rebeca Thomas, and I am a manager of clinical program development at Walgreens. This means part of my job is to help ensure the information and healthcare services Walgreens provides our customers and patients is clinically accurate and reliable. This applies to printed materials such as posters and pamphlets in our stores and digital content on our website that contains information for our patients about chronic health conditions, vaccines and general health topics.
Family values and work ethic
When I was 5 years old, my family moved from Ecuador to the North Side of Chicago. My family always valued education, hard work and making life better for their kids. From a very young age, my parents instilled in me and my siblings the importance of overcoming challenges, never giving up, caring for others and working hard to succeed. We were striving for the American dream, and we felt like we had something to prove to show that we belonged and deserved success in our new home in the U.S.
When I was going to high school, my family and I moved from the city to the nearby suburb of Skokie, Illinois. Shortly after graduating, I gave birth to my first daughter, Natalie, and I was also accepted into the nursing program at Loyola University in Chicago. With a lot of help from my family, resilience and the work ethic I was raised with, I completed the program and became a nurse in 2005.
Exploring healthcare
I loved my job as a nurse. As someone who always loved helping people, I was amazed by the different aspects, practices and challenges of the profession and enjoyed the opportunity to work with patients in an environment that exposed me to many facets of healthcare. Unfortunately, a nurse’s schedule is difficult to manage for a new mother, and there were a lot of nights, weekends and holidays that I had to miss spending with Natalie.
With encouragement from one of my brothers, who worked at a pharmaceutical company, I took my education and nursing experience and found a corporate role with a more predictable schedule, conducting post-market surveillance for a medical device manufacturer.
Finding myself in this new environment was not always easy. I still felt like I had something to prove—I needed to go above and beyond, adapt and hustle to succeed regardless of any challenge thrown my way.
The start of my career at Walgreens
It was 2014 when I made the move to Walgreens as a quality management nurse analyst. This role also relied heavily on my clinical experience as a nurse and patient advocate, and I was thrilled to find myself among dedicated, passionate individuals who came from all walks of healthcare and possessed incredible expertise, from clinical and compliance to legal, quality assurance and beyond.
I quickly learned this role was challenging and rewarding at the same time. There are many tasks and responsibilities that require a broad skillset, including the ability to develop wide-ranging solutions. Providing quality healthcare services to communities across the country requires tremendous collaboration, attention to detail, commitment, empathy and adaptability to ensure we provide our patients with outstanding care.
I still recall the awe I felt upon discovering just how many people rely on Walgreens and our unique ability to impact the lives of many people in a positive way. I also learned that my Hispanic background and fluency in Spanish are invaluable with many stores located in communities where some first-generation patients can better understand complex medical information in their native language.
Walgreens Clinical Integrity
Today I work in the Walgreens Office of Clinical Integrity, a department composed of various clinicians—nurses, nutritionists, physicians, and pharmacists. I joined this department shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic. My family had grown by this time with the addition of my daughter Bella, now 18 years old, and my son, Nick, who is going to be 13 soon.
Like the rest of the world, our team had to move quickly and develop clinically sound solutions on the fly to ensure that our teams and patients were safe and protected. My colleagues and I worked with practically every Walgreens department to provide guidance, implement protocols, facilitate delivery of essential tools and resources, and do everything we could to support our teams in serving their patients during a time unlike any other in history.
Today, the work we do remains just as important. My department oversees and approves the accuracy of all clinical information, and we help ensure patient-facing Walgreens communications are clinically accurate and evidence based. We create guides and FAQs about health issues and illnesses that help our store teams educate our patients and customers. For instance, we just created a document on Bird Flu to equip our teams with knowledge about the virus.
Although it has been a while since I donned a nurse’s uniform, that experience is still paying off in many ways. The interactions I had with patients, families, doctors, hospital administration and my clinical knowledge come in handy in my current role. The daily work we do in clinical integrity helps give people peace of mind in knowing they can rely on Walgreens as a knowledgeable, approachable healthcare resource they can trust.
