Mike Espel: At the Intersection of Faith and Pharmacy

The year was 2008. Michael Phelps swam his way to 8 Olympic gold medals and 7 world records in Beijing. Marvel’s first movie, Iron Man, trailed Warner Brothers’ The Dark Knight at the U.S. box office. And, Barack Obama, then a young Senator from Illinois, made history as the first African American to be elected U.S. President.

For Mike Espel, the year was a turning point for his career at St. Vincent de Paul. A neighbor had arrived at the Charitable Pharmacy, located at that time in the Liz Carter Outreach Center, in hopeful search of a new insulin pump. Hers had stopped working, she explained, and she needed the device to help control dangerous swings in her blood glucose levels. Helping patients to improve their health was his passion, and it was the reason he agreed to take on the role of Director of the Charitable Pharmacy just a year and a half earlier. But, resources were tight, and the Pharmacy typically didn’t receive donations of insulin pumps.

As he prepared to turn the woman away, a thought popped into his head to check a box on the Pharmacy’s top shelf. It wasn’t logical, he knew. But he went to look any way. As he pulled the box down, he saw it contained the exact insulin pump that the woman had been using – and desperately needed.

“I knew at that moment that God was with me,” Mike recalls. Waves of emotion poured over him as he realized God had provided exactly what he needed at exactly the right time. It was divine intervention. Now, Mike will often point to that encounter as a defining moment in the trajectory of the Charitable Pharmacy, and his personal journey to understanding the power of prayer.

The first few years of operating the Charitable Pharmacy were stressful. When Liz Carter, then Executive Director of St. Vincent de Paul, approached Mike with an idea to start a Charitable Pharmacy and an offer to serve as its leader, he knew he was the perfect person for the job. With 32 years of experience working in pharmaceutical care for the Cincinnati Health Department, he believed he had the background and leadership skills needed to succeed.

But, Mike says, after the Pharmacy launched in 2006, he was burdened with constant worry about its survival.

Donors had opened their wallets to buy wholesale medications to stock the shelves. Pharmaceutical companies had stepped up to donate more expensive medications that were needed. And some of the brightest minds in Cincinnati had lobbied state lawmakers to pass a bill so St. Vincent de Paul and other non-profit, charitable pharmacies, could dispense those medications free of charge. “I thought it was my job to produce [results],” says Mike. “I didn’t want to let everyone down.”

That all changed as Mike stood in the Pharmacy on that day in 2008, with an insulin pump in his hands. “My doubts about the Pharmacy’s success dissolved into confidence that it would work,” Mike says. That year, the Charitable Pharmacy would fill over 18,000 prescriptions.

By 2020, that number would grow to over 73,000 prescriptions, valued at over $11.6 million, dispensed in just one year.

Rusty Curington

Those statistics are truly only a small part of the Charitable Pharmacy’s impact. As Mike puts it, he knew that giving out free medication wasn’t ever really the purpose of the Charitable Pharmacy. The ultimate goal would always be to help people get healthier. That’s why, in 2008, Espel launched the Pharmacy’s first clinical programs. Pharmacists at St. Vincent de Paul wouldn’t just fill prescriptions; they would measure how those medications are actually That outcomes-based approach was put into overdrive under the leadership of Rusty Curington, who takes over as Director of the Charitable Pharmacy upon Mike’s retirement this month. “Rusty really put it on steroids,” Mike jokes. “He knew exactly how to measure outcomes and really raised the bar of what we were trying to do here.”

For Rusty, St. Vincent de Paul has been a crossroads for two of his passions: education and pharmacy. After starting his career as an English teacher, Rusty says he felt a calling to go back to school and pursue a degree in pharmacy. In 2008, he signed up to volunteer at St. Vincent de Paul to gain some experience in the industry – and that’s when he first met Mike Espel.

“I felt like our hearts were knit together,” Rusty recalls. “I truly am where I am today because Mike poured his heart and soul into me.”

After returning to the Charitable Pharmacy as an intern, Rusty was then hand-selected by Mike to train with him as a Pharmacy Resident. Then, in 2014, Rusty joined the Charitable Pharmacy staff, in a grant-writing position that Mike had created just for him. As Mike now explains it, he saw a need for another set of hands to help get the funding the Pharmacy needed to continue to grow programming.

“It was a leap of faith to hire him,” Mike says. “But Rusty proved he was worth it. That year he earned three-quarters of his paycheck back in grant funding.”

Since then, Rusty has become an indispensable leader at the St. Vincent de Paul Charitable Pharmacy, most recently serving as the Assistant Director. He led the design of the Pharmacy’s Medication Therapy Management (MTM) program, in which pharmacy interns create and track interventions in patients’ medication regimens. Rusty has also become an expert on tobacco cessation and diabetes management education, and counsels patients on how to manage their disease through a collaborative practice agreement with the Good Samaritan Free Health Center. To Rusty, the transition to the role of Director of the Charitable Pharmacy is a natural fit. “Almost all of the programs we’ve had, I’ve designed. And all of the trash cans we have, I’ve cleaned out,” he quips.

It is that humble attitude, and an eye for innovation, that Mike says will serve Rusty well as Director. But his biggest qualification, Mike says, is his faith. “The greatest thing about Rusty is he lives his faith. And that allows him to always put a positive spin on things.”

It’s now tradition for staff at the Charitable Pharmacy to pray together whenever they find themselves in need of resources. And, Mike says he knows that tradition will continue for years to come. “I cannot think of a time when He has not answered our call in some way.”