News & Media

The American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy is proud to announce it has selected 30 individuals to join its prestigious Academic Leadership Fellows Program, which aims to support and contribute to the development of leaders in academic pharmacy and higher education.

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.

The American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy is pleased to announce that the American Foundation for Pharmaceutical Education (AFPE) will once again sponsor three AACP Social and Administrative Sciences (SAS) Section Summer Research Exchange Mentorship Program awards for summer 2021. These awards of $2,500 each will support student pharmacists as they pursue research with host mentors outside of their home institutions.

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 Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Institute pushed teams to take a hard look at their schools as they strive to make their campuses better for everyone. History is not history in Mississippi. That’s what Dr. Katie McClendon said as she welcomed nearly 400 attendees to the inaugural Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Institute hosted by AACP and the University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy. She told the story of James Meredith, the first Black student to enroll at Ole Miss.

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.

Pharmacy schools are finding creative ways to advocate for the COVID-19 vaccines and to fight falsehoods circulating online. While millions of vaccines are going into arms across the country to prevent the spread of COVID-19, a flurry of misinformation about vaccine efficacy and the disease itself also is spreading.