“Community is meant to support each other, look after each other; in philosophical words, humanity is community,” says Dipak Sanghvi, a man well acquainted with caring for his neighbours.
Sanghvi will receive a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for his work as a pharmacist and board member for many of Australia’s premier healthcare institutions, including Monash Health, Musculoskeletal Australia, Amcal Australia, the Pharmacy Guild of Australia and most recently, Ambulance Victoria. Dipak Sanghvi AM
“Healthcare is one of the purest form of public service… it was fortunate that I got into pharmacy and it started to get me interested in understanding people’s suffering and understanding what they require,” he says of his career.
Born in Uganda, Sanghvi studied pharmacy in Brighton, UK, before migrating to Australia with his wife in 1976, a journey he says has helped him ‘understand the demands and requirements of different cultures’.
Though initially feeling the familial pressure to become a doctor, it was the frontline communication and retail aspects of pharmacy that first captured his interest, before burgeoning into an interest in the lifespans of customers.
“Health is a very addictive place in a sense, because once you are in health, you just get involved too much and there is no way out of that,” he says.
In 1979, Sanghvi opened his first pharmacy on Smith Street, Collingwood, working three jobs to make the deposit; now a bustling inner-city precinct, he remembers Collingwood in the 80s as a ‘quite nice little area with a little pharmacy’. Later, in the same decade, he opened more pharmacies in the western suburbs (Melton, Deer Park, St Albans), some of which are still owned by the family.
“I used to live in Ivanhoe and drive out at 7am to open the pharmacy (in Melton), and then close at 9pm, and come home at 10:30pm – that was repeated seven days a week for months without any breaks,” Sanghvi recalls.
“But that was part of life. My wife was very supportive; we had three kids by then so she would bring the kids to visit me in the pharmacy. She put a lot of effort in making sure that the support was there for me to continue the work I did.”
It was here Sanghvi realised the importance of pharmacies as a frontline community health service, something which has informed his advocacy on the boards of Amcal and the Pharmacy Guild of Australia.
“We would talk to 40, 50 people a day and sometimes 30 don’t need any medication, they just need comfort and an understanding of their health [conditions]… you start to realise how important it is to help some people by talking about their problems,” he says.
“I also realised there is a lot of loneliness in the community. There were many old people coming in who had no one to talk with. They would come in, say hello and talk a bit, and then head off. The more I look at the health system with all the knowledge I have…loneliness is the biggest problem we’ve got.” Dipak Sanghvi AM
As the chair of Gold Cross Products and Services until 2014, a subsidiary of the Pharmacy Guild of Australia, Sanghvi upheld the quality and trust of the brand behind the iconic Glucojel jellybeans (his favourite flavour is the black one) and pharmacy-only everyday medicines.
He has just finished his tenure as chair of Monash Health, a role he has been in since 2016. Over his tenure, Sanghvi has seen the organisation through the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, the opening of the Victorian Heart Hospital, and Monash Health’s highest-ever volume of planned surgeries.
“The thing that I observed and admired [during COVID] was the compassion and the professionalism of all these people in looking after health [of patients]. Their whole idea was how to make the patient comfortable, safe, and give them the right treatment,” he remembers.
“When you look at other countries, a lot of doctors and nurses died – we didn’t lose a single one.” Dipak Sanghvi AM
Primary healthcare as the first line of defence
Sanghvi is currently a board member for Ambulance Victoria, where he utilises his knowledge of primary healthcare and the hospital system to reduce the strain on emergency services and deliver the right services to patients.
“COVID helped us see that people can contribute in different ways,” Sanghvi says. “Physiotherapists, dentists – they’re all part of the health ecosystem. The challenge is how we bring them together to deliver the best outcomes for the public.”
“Hospitals have limited capacity. We need to ensure that those who require hospital care receive it, while the rest of treatment is delivered through primary healthcare.”
