News & Media

Pharmacy schools and organizations—including AACP—shine the spotlight on well-being for faculty, students and staff. With a growing recognition that wellness is also intertwined with holistic patient care, lifestyle medicine could present new career paths for pharmacists.

A new 4-H project book published in partnership with The Ohio State University College of Pharmacy teaches medication safety to elementary students. When it comes to teaching children healthy habits, medication safety may not be the first thing that comes to mind. Yet it could be a lifesaving lesson.

The Kennedy Pharmacy Innovation Center pushes students to find gaps in the profession and fill them with radical roles.

The Federally Qualified Urban Health Network provides a model for collaboration that includes pharmacists as part of primary care teams serving low-income populations.

Pharmacy schools continue to engage with their communities to fight the national opioid crisis. t’s no secret that opioids can lead to dependence. Opioid use can increase a patient’s risk of respiratory depression, fatal and nonfatal overdose. During the COVID-19 pandemic, prescription and non-prescription opioid misuse or opioid use disorder has become a pressing public health emergency.

Patients want transparency about prescription costs and are turning to pharmacists as a trusted source to help them navigate. Prescription drug spending reached almost $370 billion in the United States in 2019, according to National Health Expenditure data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

As calls increase to correct longstanding inequities in healthcare, pharmacists are exploring ways to improve training and practice to better serve marginalized groups. While discriminatory practices in healthcare settings have existed for decades, the COVID-19 pandemic further revealed inequities rooted in the longstanding unequal treatment of minorities in this country.

Aren’t vaccines the most wonderful tool in our toolboxes? While there are still so many uncertainties associated with our individual and collective behaviors in month 16 of the global pandemic, I personally have found that the increasing percentage of the eligible population to have received at least one dose of available vaccines very reassuring, even liberating.

A recent AACP webinar explored tools and tips for virtual networking as well as what to expect when in-person interactions resume. Although networking has changed significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, it remains vital at every career stage. From first-year students to top-ranking experts, networking allows individuals to share knowledge, gain experience and make connections that can lead to new professional opportunities.

As this issue of Academic Pharmacy Now goes live, I am pausing to reflect on the last 14 months of pandemic navigation. What has changed? What hasn’t changed? AACP has been fortunate that all our staff were remote work-enabled on March 13 (Friday the 13th for sure!)

With digital health tools improving patient outcomes and changing the way pharmacists deliver care, pharmacy schools are starting to integrate digital health education into the curriculum to prepare students for rapid advances in technology. As it did with so many facets of our lives, the pandemic altered routines and changed the way patients received medical care in the past year.

The Sustainable Pharmacy Project at VCU’s School of Pharmacy aims to shine a light on the environmental impact of pharmaceuticals. In the process of improving health and saving lives, healthcare providers generate a large amount of waste. Pharmaceuticals account for much of that waste: the chemicals used in laboratories and drug manufacturing, sharps, plastic pill bottles and unused medications, to name a few.