33 minute read
Advocating for LGBTQ+ Education
Student pharmacists have the empathy and desire to help LGBTQ+ patients. Many schools are examining their curricula to find ways to broaden their scope.
By Athena Ponushis
LGBTQ+ people face an array of health disparities. They are at higher risk of having anxiety, depression, mental illness and substance use disorder. They are more likely to struggle with poverty and isolation. They are more likely to contemplate and attempt suicide. These challenges are consistent across the LGBTQ+ population, yet pharmacy school curricula are inconsistent, and the approaches to educating future pharmacists on LGBTQ+ issues differ drastically among institutions.
A cross-sectional survey recently published in Currents in Pharmacy Teaching and Learning shows how transgenderrelated care is taught to variable degrees in Pharm.D. programs: A little more than half the schools surveyed reported transgender-related care was currently addressed somewhere within the curriculum, yet only half the respondents felt confident that their graduating pharmacists would be competent in providing care to transgender patients. Most responding schools teach only one or two hours of transgender-related care in their entire curriculum, and the schools that do not presently teach it have no plans to incorporate additional courses.
Dr. Cheyenne Newsome, coauthor of the research paper and assistant professor of pharmacotherapy at Washington State University College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, expected that some schools would not include this content at all. But when she saw the results—nearly 50 percent of schools do not teach transgenderrelated care and have no interest in doing so even after taking the survey and thinking on the matter—she was disappointed. “That’s creating so many graduates who have no exposure to learning about how to care for trans people, so even if they have the best of intentions, they are not equipped with the knowledge and skills to provide good care,” Newsome said.
LGBTQ+ content may not yet be required in the Pharm.D. curriculum and some schools may decide not to include it, but students are keen to learn how to care for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning/ queer individuals. Faculty who have introduced LGBTQ+ content into their courses report that students welcome the topic, are active and engaged in discussions and eager to learn more. Additional research papers, all as candid and compelling as the crosssectional survey, have sounded a call to action for LGBTQ+ content to be required and customary so future pharmacists can help improve health outcomes for individuals who, having been repeatedly mistreated when seeking care, do not seek medical attention when they need it most.
Fulfilling an Oath
How can pharmacists best serve LGBTQ+ people? A recent American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education article title sums it up: “The Pharmacist as an LGBTQ Ally.” The article defines an ally as one whose purpose is to help, to provide support and assistance in an ongoing effort or struggle. The commentary argues that most colleges of pharmacy are not well equipped to teach future pharmacists how to counsel LGBTQ+ individuals, while it reiterates the oath of a pharmacist, to “consider the welfare of humanity and relief of suffering my primary concerns.”
Dr. Oliver Grundmann, lead author of the article and clinical associate professor at the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, sees a deeper meaning in educating future pharmacists to serve LGBTQ+ people beyond that oath. The LGBTQ+ community, like many other minority communities, needs allies in healthcare who can understand their specific needs and give them credence.
“We see a pattern that kind of projects out in life, if LGBTQ folks experience rejection early on, or they are not supported by their family, by their friends, not accepted for being as they are,” Grundmann said, “they tend to have higher rates of depression and anxiety, homelessness, especially with LGBTQ+ youth, mental health problems and substance use disorders that may start early in life, and subsequent consequences related to stress or obesity accompanied by an eating disorder. This is a particular area where pharmacists can provide advice to caregivers or to youth as they struggle with such disorders. And it’s important to be mindful when counseling older LGBTQ folks that, throughout their life span, they may have suffered and continue to suffer discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender expression.”
Grundmann believes pharmacists may be uniquely positioned to connect with LGBTQ+ people and inspire the patient engagement needed to attain optimal health. “In order to see a pharmacist, you do not need to make an appointment, you do not need to present health insurance, you do not need a prescription, you just need to go to a pharmacy, go to the counter and say, ‘I would like to talk with a pharmacist,’” he pointed out. “I realize that currently pharmacies are not compensated appropriately for offering this service, but I think there is a model where we can say it is a compassionate, human service, as the oath of pharmacy states, we serve humanity and all of humanity, to make sure everyone is cared for and to ensure the health of all human beings.”
Passionate about LGBTQ+ issues for professional and personal reasons, Grundmann came out as a gay male at the age of 17. After graduating from pharmacy school, he moved to the United States from Germany in 2004 to start his graduate studies at UF where he met his partner. The two were married in 2015 and are now raising two daughters. Grundmann has seen his students share his passion for LGBTQ+ issues. When he first held an active learning session on how to be more inclusive in a pharmacy environment and more welcoming of LGBTQ+ community members, the conversations he had with his secondyear Pharm.D. students were lively.
“They showed their interest not only from a professional perspective, but they showed that they truly cared. They wanted to know more about this topic, and that was encouraging. I saw this passion that I personally had reflected in the passion my students have for this topic. It was already there, it just needed to be kindled or tended to,” Grundmann said. “We did not have enough time during the active learning session and quite a few students came to me afterward to say it was a great session and they wanted to continue the discussion.”
“This is a particular area where pharmacists can provide advice to caregivers or to youth as they struggle with [substance use or eating] disorders. And it’s important to be mindful when counseling older LGBTQ folks that, throughout their life span, they may have suffered and continue to suffer discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender expression.” —Dr. Oliver Grundmann
A Critical Takeaway
When Newsome joined the faculty at WSU a few years ago, she began teaching three hours of transgender care in a required course. She taught the terminology and pharmacotherapy of transgender care, elaborating on patient interaction and pronoun etiquette. Other faculty members took notice and followed suit, creatively weaving LGBTQ+ content into their courses.
Last year Newsome added a case study on masculine hormone therapy for trans masculine individuals to the men’s health session in the P3 year. It serves as a refresher for students and gives them the opportunity to ask more questions. In the fall she expanded on cancer screening discussions in the oncology block, describing how easily cancer screenings can be missed in trans people, how a person who presents as male may have a cervix and need a Pap smear. Her fellow faculty members added a two-hour lab session to the first-year communications course on gender minorities, focusing on women and trans people. They plan to add a transgender case to the applied patient care lab in the spring, where students will identify pharmacotherapy-related concerns as they work through the patient case.
But what has had the greatest impact on students has been facilitating opportunities for them to see how pharmacists can make a difference. Newsome’s students rank discussion with a guest speaker as the thing that has helped them the most. Newsome noted that when schools bring in a respectable community member who is transgender, students are able to hear a personal story and make a connection that opens their eyes and inspires them to care for LGBTQ+ individuals. That’s what Newsome believes students need to know most: the impact they can make.
“My guest speaker has had good experiences with pharmacy and bad experiences with pharmacy. He shares the experiences his trans friends have had with healthcare professionals, too,” she said. “When students hear from an individual who has had a bad experience or a good experience, they begin to understand the impact they can make by being a trans-competent provider. It helps them see why it’s important to learn this material and it helps them feel more comfortable and confident stepping up to be a good provider. Obviously, the medications are important, but they are not complicated and that information is readily available. Pharmacists are good at looking things up, so I think the key piece is helping students build that empathy and desire to help trans people.”
UF has also modernized its Pharm.D. curriculum, increasing the number of diverse case studies, including LGBTQ-specific cases, during active learning sessions. “When we talk about hormone therapy, we talk about transgender patients. When we talk about the different stages of aging, we include either a lesbian woman or gay male, maybe in a case relating to prostate cancer, but we don’t want to stereotype here, we don’t want to bring out a gay male case when it comes to HIV/AIDS. We want to be diverse in that as well,” Grundmann said.
He would like to see a more holistic approach to the pharmacy curriculum that underscores that a person’s sexual orientation or gender expression— while only one element that defines someone’s identity—may impact daily life and well-being. And when it comes to LGBTQ+ issues, he would like programs to look at the social, economic and medical disparities that jeopardize the long-term health of this population. “What I want to see is that LGBTQ+ issues are consistent throughout the curriculum, that we do not only look at it in one course and then make a checkmark, because it really stretches from medication care to health insurance coverage to inequities in disadvantaged areas, depending on where you live,” Grundmann emphasized. “There are many different factors that impact a person. We need to be aware of that and think about how we as pharmacists can provide overall care to patients.”
The First Step
Before pharmacists can provide holistic care, they must create an environment where LGBTQ+ patients feel comfortable, safe, welcome and affirmed. “Sexual gender minorities face health disparities in every arena of life, whether it’s related to substance use disorders or just access to care. Those disparities are real and prevalent,” said Dr. Kyle Melin, associate professor at the University of Puerto Rico School of Pharmacy. “Until we as a profession learn how to create an environment where LGBTQ individuals feel safe and welcome in our healthcare settings, we are not going to be able to address their healthcare needs and those disparities which come out of those needs. Until we undo that barrier and create an environment where they feel safe and respected, we are not going to be able to help people the way we want to.”
At the University of Puerto Rico, the majority of LGBTQ+ education has centered on cultivating such cultural competency. Melin is working on ways to incorporate LGBTQ+ issues into the therapeutics curriculum, particularly concerning transgender and gender nonbinary patient care, improving instruction relating to hormone therapy and gender affirming therapy to better build the capacity of pharmacists. While Melin has not seen much movement at any official level to accredit LGBTQ+ content as a national standard, he has seen movement among students. Students are seeking out this content and training and have identified it as an area that they want to work on to be better prepared as pharmacists to provide care for all patients. “The students have been incredibly positive and highly motivated. They are really helping to push the profession forward,” Melin noted. “That’s why I like working with students—they have not resigned to things being the way they are and they have this sense of, ‘We can make things better,’ and they inspire us to do that.”
Melin’s research and work with students led to a study assessing readiness to provide pharmaceutical care to transgender patients, gleaning perspectives from pharmacists and transgender individuals, that was published in the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association. The study found that pharmacists were aware of their knowledge deficits when it comes to providing care for transgender patients and that they were open to receiving training and education. He and his students worked on providing a continuing education program, published in Pharmacy Practice, and once again found that pharmacists were eager to improve.
Melin also found that despite what pharmacists did not know, transgender patients still believed pharmacists could play an important role in their healthcare. “In conversations with transgender individuals there was this sense that, pharmacists know about medications and I am taking different medications and they can help me, even if they don’t know about pronouns or don’t understand my identity or understand how I would prefer to be spoken to, they can help me,” Melin said.
One distinction that Melin and Newsome point out: Within the LGBTQ community, individuals have different needs. “We say LGBT all the time, but the T is kind of this add-on, like they’re included in this catch-all umbrella of LGBT, but it’s a subpopulation that’s really been neglected or overlooked even within the lens of LGBT work,” Melin said. “There’s so much more we have to do as a society and as a profession as well to prepare our pharmacists to understand the unique needs and disparities faced by transgender and gender nonbinary individuals.”
The American College of Clinical Pharmacy updated its pharmacotherapy didactic curriculum toolkit in 2019, categorizing what topics should be covered into three tiers. (Tier 1: Students must be taught this in therapeutics courses. Tier 2: If there’s time, it would be good to include. Tier 3: Students are responsible for learning this on their own.) Gender affirming care was added to the toolkit in 2019 as a Tier 3, listed as not necessary to include in therapeutics courses. Newsome sees that as a step in the right direction, that transgender-related care is starting to appear on the radar, but fears people still do not understand its importance.
“If you’re not teaching it, I guess one of the assumptions I make is you don’t think it’s important enough to teach, so I always try to emphasize the risks of graduating pharmacists who are not competent to care for the LGBTQ community,” Newsome explained. “What are the risks of those microaggressions that patients continually face? What does that add up to? The suicide attempt rate for people who are transgender is nine times higher than the general population. Part of what I think leads to that is the mistreatment from medical providers and the lack of trust there, so I try to emphasize the importance of this education and the risks of putting providers out there who are not equipped to help care for this vulnerable population. They can do harm, and that’s not what we want to do.” P
Athena Ponushis is a freelance writer based in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Stronger Together
Pharmacy schools are finding innovative approaches to interprofessional education, collaborating with other health professions to achieve improved patient outcomes.
By Jane E. Rooney
“Imagine a typical patient suffering from chronic pain. That person is dealing with multiple health professionals—sometimes up to 10 or 12 over time. Do they talk to each other? The answer typically is no. What patients are now dealing with is a highly truncated system in which information is not always shared and they get multiple pieces of advice,” said Dr. Frank Ascione, director, University of Michigan Center for Interprofessional Education (IPE), and former dean of the college of pharmacy.
Enter interprofessional education, which helps provide patients with a more coordinated approach to care and more efficient use of resources, he said, noting “the hope is that IPE leads to more satisfaction, more efficiency and healthier outcomes.” The World Health Organization defines IPE as occurring “when students from two or more professions learn about, from, and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes.” (“Learners” is now being used rather than students, to include clinicians and practicing health professionals.) Every pharmacy school must include IPE as part of ACPE accreditation standards. The Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC), which represents 21 national health profession education associations— pharmacy among the original six professions included— developed the core competencies that pharmacy schools use to fulfill accreditation requirements.
“We know that teams impact outcomes if they are deployed properly and supported in the environment in which they work,” said Dr. Barbara Brandt, director, National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education and professor in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Minnesota. “There’s a real need for educating health professionals as well as non-health professionals who they work with in the same setting to improve health outcomes. AACP being part of the IPEC group is absolutely critical in driving that conversation.”
Pharmacy has proven to be a trailblazer in IPE and has strong leadership compared to other health professions, Brandt continued, because it was one of the first to have robust accreditation standards back in the early 2000s. “There are a lot of pharmacy faculty members who have deep experience because they have been held accountable for a number of years so they are being tapped as leaders,” she said. “The visible leadership at some of these institutions is incredible. They are engaging physicians and other health professions across the board.”
Examples of innovations in IPE—some driven by the need to change course during the pandemic—are plentiful at pharmacy schools across the country. As the need for collaboration among health professionals increases, schools are adapting and exploring new ways to expose student pharmacists to IPE opportunities.
Understanding Other Disciplines
The University of Michigan Center for IPE came to fruition in 2015 thanks to support and funding from the administration and faculty buy-in. As Ascione was stepping down as dean of the college of pharmacy, faculty returning from an IPEC conference expressed enthusiasm for developing a team-based clinical decision-making course. Ascione asked for and received support from the deans and provost to lead an IPE center. “I recognized that we had this grassroots movement so I saw the support for it was there. At the same time, the university was engaged in a third century funding grant, so there was money available for a [$3 million] transitional grant,” he said. “Pharmacy is ideal in terms of engaging in [IPE]. We’re inherently a team-based profession. We practice across the whole healthcare span, from the institutional to the community setting. In terms of addressing healthcare problems, we’re in an ideal spot to do something. It would be difficult to engage in the interprofessional movement without pharmacy involved.”
The Center takes a menu-based approach with its IPE offerings. “One big premise is, how can you learn about what someone does if you don’t know anything about
“We as an Academy are proud that pharmacy is one of the drivers of IPE thanks to our aggressive accreditation standards. Hopefully faculty champions can use this report to continue to drive change, which will better position IPE within their organization.” —Dr. Sarah Shrader
them? We provide an opportunity to learn about the backgrounds of other professions. That’s the basis for anything else. You need to know the expertise of other people you’re working with,” he emphasized, adding that engaging in team-based behavior is a necessity at Michigan, which has 14 disciplines involved in IPE. Students must interact with at least one other profession, and being a large and diverse school offers advantages in terms of broader IPE experiences.
“We offer a course on global health run by the business school. There is another one on trauma through the schools of education, nursing and social work. It explores various trauma among health educators, children and other groups. It looks at broader aspects of society. We’re also doing some technological innovations with simulations and clinical experiences.” Student pharmacists must look beyond simply focusing on medications to be part of a team, he noted.
“When you are looking at a skill set, it isn’t just the technical aspects of drug products,” Ascione continued. “It is learning to transmit that information to a team and giving appropriate advice. Unless pharmacists are sensitive to the perspectives of other professions, they may be too narrow in their approach and less effective team members.”
At Texas Southern University College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, IPE is interwoven through the curriculum in a didactic setting in the first, third and fourth years, with an experiential focus in the second year. All first-year students take a communications lab, according to Dr. Portia Davis, interim executive director, Division of Interprofessional Practice and Simulation, and associate professor of pharmacy practice, and participate in interprofessional work sessions with students in disciplines such as respiratory therapy nursing and health administration. “Students work to disclose a medication error to a patient’s family as a result of a communications failure,” Davis explained.
“In the spring of the first year, students are enrolled in an ethics course, which they take at the same time with clinical lab sciences students, respiratory therapy students and others,” she continued. “That course features ethical problem solving with clinical vignettes. It includes panel discussions and active learning. In the second and third years, we try to pair students in our community settings on their rotations with students from one of our local teaching hospital systems. Sometimes it works well but sometimes scheduling logistics with medical students doesn’t work for all students. They work together under the supervision of both clinical pharmacists and physicians in chronic disease state clinics to create care plans.”
As part of their cocurricular activities, third-year students attend a large-scale interprofessional event at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Davis said that the event, which involves at least 14 disciplines, explores a patient case surrounding a high school athlete who becomes septic and has complications requiring amputations. Social and administrative sciences as well as underrepresented disciplines such as medical humanities are included. “Our students are always well received and come back thankful to hear how much it opens others’ eyes to what pharmacists can do,” she said. “That event seems to be their most memorable experience.”
The college of pharmacy’s largest event—a simulation case for fourth-year students that uses high-fidelity mannequins—aims to incorporate all disciplines. Students work together to document and work through a plan
for patient care; a student-led debriefing includes guest facilitators. Davis said she is committed to adding more layers to the current IPE experience.
Faculty underwent facilitator training for a poverty simulation just before the pandemic. The plan is to offer a virtual session later this year but Davis hopes it will become an annual event. “While what we’ve done has been impactful, I don’t think it’s been enough,” she noted. “With everyone being forced to work remotely due to COVID-19, some of the barriers have been eliminated so we want to expand upon what we currently offer.”
Examining the IPE Landscape
The American Interprofessional Health Collaborative (AIHC), the professional community of the National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education, conducted a survey in late 2019 to increase understanding of IPE organizational models. Dr. Elena Umland, associate dean of academic affairs at the Jefferson College of Pharmacy and associate provost for interprofessional practice and education at Thomas Jefferson University, who served on the survey task force, said the goal was to answer questions such as what does the IPE organizational structure look like at different schools; how much support is coming from the administration; does it live within a particular college; is it centralized; and what contributes to the success of a program?
“We were hoping this report would lay the foundation so people can see where we’re starting from,” Umland said. “You need the resources to deliver a high-quality IPE program. From a pharmacy perspective, institutions and colleges can use this report to say, we could be further ahead with this if we had some resources. One of the findings had to do with the value placed on IPE relative to promotion and tenure—it’s not always explicit in our guidelines. The institutions that do [tie those together] tend to have faculty who seem more vested in participating in IPE.”
Dr. Sarah Shrader, professor, University of Kansas School of Pharmacy, who led the task force and was outgoing national chair of AIHC when survey preparations began in March 2019, said the survey accomplished the goal of reporting on how IPE is organized nationally and what is happening on the ground. “Now that we have our arms around what is happening, we continue tracking it and we are starting to think about best practices,” she said. “What is happening that is working well that we could suggest for others to follow? We’ve done some further analysis and in the manuscript that we’re trying to finish and submit, it will go a step further than the report. We will make some suggestions about best practices and how to best organize IPE based on our findings.” That document will be published later in 2021.
Shrader noted that survey results underscored the need for senior administration to have a better understanding of IPE and the resources it takes to maintain a robust program. For example, at the University of Kansas School of Pharmacy, there are at least a dozen faculty, along with pharmacy residents and students, that facilitate several IPE activities. “It is a huge undertaking. We are fortunate to have the support of our talented faculty and pharmacy administrators. Unfortunately, this is not the case at all institutions,” she said.
“We as an Academy are proud that pharmacy is one of the drivers of IPE thanks to our aggressive accreditation
“I am hoping we really stay true to our mission to produce practice-ready graduates. You need a strong interprofessional base for this. They need to be comfortable and know their role in team-based care and be able to provide virtual patient care. They must be able to contribute to teams remotely and go above and beyond when situations require such actions.” —Dr. Portia Davis
IPEC’s Mission: Enhanced Team-Based Care
The Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC), which represents 21 national health profession education associations, developed core competencies for interprofessional collaborative practice that pharmacy schools across the country use to fulfill ACPE accreditation requirements. The competencies are: 1. Work with individuals of other professions to maintain a climate of mutual respect and shared values. 2. Use the knowledge of one’s own role and those of other professions to appropriately assess and address the healthcare needs of patients and to promote and advance the health of populations. 3. Communicate with patients, families, communities and professionals in health and other fields in a responsive and responsible manner that supports a team approach to the promotion and maintenance of health and the prevention and treatment of disease. 4. Apply relationship-building values and the principles of team dynamics to perform effectively in different team roles to plan, deliver and evaluate patient/population-centered care and population health programs and policies that are safe, timely, efficient, effective and equitable.
These competencies, last updated in 2016, are being revised and an updated version will be published next year, according to Dr. Kelly Ragucci, AACP’s vice president of professional development, and liaison to IPEC’s Planning Committee. She said that in addition to offering programming that includes two institutes each year, an annual interprofessional leadership program and various webinars, IPEC also supports IPE research.
“IPEC is currently supporting a project titled ‘Leveraging the IPEC Competency Framework to Transform Health Professions Education,’” she said. “This grant is funded by the Macy Foundation and will support the development of a tool to standardize assessment of institutional progress toward IPE implementation using the IPEC framework. IPEC has always been at the forefront of these issues.” IPEC’s mission is to ensure that new and current health professionals are proficient in the competencies essential for patient-centered, community- and population-oriented, interprofessional collaborative practice.
The pandemic has further highlighted the need for IPE among health professions, Ragucci noted. “The importance of teamwork and improved communication strategies has never been more important when it comes to improving patient care,” she said. “The key is translating education to practice and assuring that health professions work together to deliver efficient, effective and equitable care. Pharmacy schools have developed unique, creative strategies when it comes to offering IPE both on campus and virtually. We need to continue to support schools and colleges in these efforts and improve mechanisms to share resources. The ultimate goal is to ensure that students enter the workforce as integral members of the collaborative practice team.” For more information, visit www.ipecollaborative.org standards,” she continued. “Hopefully faculty champions can use this report to continue to drive change, which will better position IPE within their organization. In terms of areas for improvement of IPE, the majority of respondents said universities and organizations should think through including this more intentionally in promotion and tenure guidelines. So many pharmacy faculty are highly involved leaders in IPE, we want to see them getting credit for that. The other thing we saw from the data was the need to think about ways to get more faculty involved in IPE and honor the amount of time it takes. We want to make sure that the work and service on IPE committees is accounted for just like any other types of teaching commitments are within schools of pharmacy. Often what we see is people get involved because they believe so passionately in IPE, but they are not allocated the time that’s needed to develop and facilitate IPE events.”
The National Center’s Brandt said the curriculum needs to prepare student pharmacists for the clinical environment, and she is focused on the idea of flipping IPE to include collaborative practice. Shrader developed a free online course with the National Center (Nexusipe.org) that teaches how to teach in practice. “My vision for pharmacy would be to take stock of how to teach in practice,” Brandt noted. “We can do all the curriculum in the world and mapping of competencies in the classroom but if our students go into practice and they are not seeing the role models, we are really wasting our time. Pharmacy schools with other health professions need to focus on how we are going to teach collaboration in our experiential programs.”
Shrader agreed that there needs to be a push for IPE in practice settings. “It’s
the being intentional aspect of it that people are wrestling with,” she noted. “One challenge is scaling the IPE in practice settings so that all students have an opportunity to get appropriate amounts of exposure and get evaluations from non-pharmacy preceptors and students from other professions.” As Michigan’s Ascione pointed out, the pandemic revealed the holes in our healthcare system and the need for health professions to work together. “From the intensive care unit to community care and health disparities—you can’t solve those issues in segments,” he said. “We need to take a broader approach. I am hoping for a more integrative approach to dealing with healthcare. Pharmacy is going to be important because pharmacy is in the community.”
Collaboration Leads to Better Patient Care
At Jefferson’s College of Pharmacy, the provost’s office provides centralized support for the Jefferson Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education (JCIPE). Every class participates in the two-year longitudinal Jefferson Health Mentors Program (JHMP) in conjunction with the colleges of health professions, medicine, nursing and rehabilitation sciences; in total, 13 disciplines currently participate. Programs such as this have positively impacted faculty in that they routinely interface with faculty from other professions.
“Through this flagship program, interprofessional student teams are paired with a community volunteer who has at least one chronic condition. We refer to these volunteers as mentors,” Umland explained. “The main purpose of the two-year program is to learn what it’s like to be a person with a chronic health condition, to learn what it’s like to traverse the healthcare system.” Those meetings always took place in person, so Umland said they had to get creative when the pandemic began last March. “Some [student teams] used FaceTime and some used the telephone as we became sensitized to the cost to the mentor of using their cell phone data plans to communicate,” she continued. “The mentors may not have unlimited data on their phones, or some of our older mentors may not feel comfortable with the technology. As we got ready for fall, we needed to recruit new mentors. Part of that involved assessing their comfort with and training them on the technology if needed. It went pretty seamlessly. We still had facilitated discussions where faculty met with small student group teams to talk about the module and debrief—we used Zoom for that. Other JCIPE programs depending on simulation for delivery found simulation by Zoom to be a challenge. But we have phenomenal full-time staff who were able to assist facilitators in getting through the steps for team modules in small groups.”
Brandt said the pandemic illustrated technology’s vital role in delivering patient care. “Last spring we had people contacting the National Center asking for help,” she noted. “They had to flip the curriculum in the middle of a semester. We offered webinars and we really were focused on the technology aspects. What we’re learning is that the students are positively rating their experiences with this flip in IPE. People are adapting and learning how to foster collaboration. People are starting to see the value of that experience related to telehealth. We’ve been talking about telehealth and training for decades. Many didn’t take it seriously. Now, having to be on Zoom, they see that it has the potential to develop skills in telehealth. I think this experience is going to teach us a number of lessons about effective methodology for using telehealth.”
At Texas Southern, an interdisciplinary simulation center allows students to work collaboratively on patient cases and gain experience with clinical decision making. Davis
AIHC Survey Results
The American Interprofessional Health Collaborative (AIHC) and the National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education surveyed 131 leaders of IPE initiatives to explore how IPE is organized at institutions across the country. To read the report, visit https://nexusipe.org/informing/ resource-center/organizationalmodels-interprofessional-practice-and-education-united.
said that since the pandemic, they have made an effort to incorporate telehealth into interprofessional activities. “I am hoping we really stay true to our mission to produce practice-ready graduates,” she said. “You need a strong interprofessional base for this. They need to be comfortable and know their role in team-based care and be able to provide virtual patient care. They must be able to contribute to teams remotely and go above and beyond when situations require such actions. Our students are building a good foundation but I want them to be confident interacting with other disciplines, regardless of their area of practice or practice setting. We’re building strong leadership skills and strong team skills. I’m hopeful that what we have learned with this pandemic will strengthen the knowledge that we have to be flexible, we must see and place our efforts toward the big picture for optimal patient care.”
Umland agreed that the goal is to prepare students to practice collaboratively. “When I meet with first- and second-year students, regardless of discipline, I tell them that before IPE you would spend years trying to figure out everyone’s place in the healthcare system is and who does what,” she said. “Now, by introducing them to each other and having them get to know each other as people at the beginning of their training, they have a much better appreciation for each other. They enter practice being able to communicate well, understand their peers well and the skills of collaboration are foundationally there. The purpose being that patient care is improved, and when you participate in patient care as part of a highly functioning team, your love for your profession improves. Burnout is less. It is so much more rewarding.”
Ultimately, IPE furthers the goal of enhanced patient care, Shrader pointed out. “New practice models are emerging where people will have to have interprofessional teamwork and communication skills in order for them to be successful,” she said. “IPE is one of the things that will help us achieve the quadruple aim in healthcare: providing better patient outcomes, a better patient experience in our healthcare system, doing it as efficiently as possible in terms of costs and resources and making sure we are providing a good experience for the healthcare providers themselves through teamwork and collaboration in a way that increases the joy and value of their work.” P
Jane E. Rooney is managing editor of Academic Pharmacy Now.
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*Source: Retrieved from O*Net on October 15, 2020. Original source: Bureau of Labor Statistics 2019 wage data and 2018-2028 employment projections.
The upward trend of the pharmacy industry
Pharmacy retains a moderate future employment outlook despite challenging market conditions.
Pharmacist Wages & Employment Trends* Median wages (2019)
$61.58 hourly, $128,090 annual
Employment (2018)
314,300 employees
Projected job openings (2018-2028)
15,300
Top industries (2018)
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Increase Your AACP Member Engagement
AACP offers unique benefits, services and opportunities for individual members such as educational programming, online member communities and numerous member resources. There are countless ways to increase your engagement with AACP and stay connected to the broader world of academic pharmacy.
Four Ways to Enhance Your AACP Engagement:
Join a New Special Interest Group
Member groups designed to help individuals stay informed and connected to colleagues with similar interests, including Leadership Development, Assessment, Women Faculty, Global Education and more! http://bit.ly/JoinASIG
Post a Question on AACP Connect
AACP’s online member community of pharmacy educators contains thousands of discussion posts, resource documents, and countless opportunities to connect with your peers. http://bit.ly/AACPConnect
Participate in an Upcoming Webinar (including webinars with CE Credit)
Stay up-to-date on industry news and best practices, with more than 30 Webinars scheduled for this Spring, many with CE credit. http://bit.ly/AACPWebinars
Attend the Annual Meeting
This July, attend AACP’s Virtual Annual Meeting, where your peers will meet to discuss pharmacy education issues and to gain insights into teaching and research in your field. www.aacp.org/pharmed2021
And find many more opportunities for involvement with AACP: http://bit.ly/AACPIndividualMembership
