From the President

Positioning for Influence: From Patient Stories to Pharmacy

Vision is the theme of this year’s annual meeting. Please join me in Winston-Salem on September 21st and 22nd at the Benton Convention Center for the NCAP annual meeting. North Carolina has been a leader in pharmacy by influencing the profession’s vision and the annual meeting is a great way to continue to move our profession forward and to learn from others. This year’s annual meeting has several roundtables and posters that demonstrate successful practices. There are also a variety of continuing education and networking activities that you will find beneficial. If you have not attended a meeting in recent years, now is the time to see the changes that have been made. On day one of the meeting, you will have the opportunity to participate in different workshops and roundtable discussions. You will gain more insight into the opioid epidemic by “dismantling stigma to transform practice” with perspectives provided by the patient, family, physician, and pharmacist. You will learn more about Medicaid managed care in NC. For our student attendees, you can also participate in OTC Jeopardy and network with many NC residency programs. On day two of the meeting, we will focus on important pharmacy issues within different sectors of the profession. The sectors we want to highlight include health-system, ambulatory care, public health, academia, community, long-term care, technicians and students. The format for this day will be a combination of facilitated discussions and short presentations to advance each of these sectors of practice. These sessions will be highly interactive, and the information gleaned will serve to shape the strategic plan and advocacy agenda for 2019. For this day to be the most successful, we not only need you to attend, but we need for you to invite your co-workers and colleagues to attend as well. I promise - your voices will be heard! Our Executive Director, Penny Shelton, has been working tirelessly on behalf of the association. It has been my pleasure to work with her and the board on behalf of the members of NCAP for the past year. In my first column addressing the membership of NCAP, I stated I had two initiatives for my presidential term. The first was to increase membership. I am happy to report that July 2018 marks the first time since November 2015 that NCAP had an increase in the monthly dues compared to the same month in the previous year. We reached a steady state and now we need to rebuild. I assure you NCAP is in a great place and we need ideas from our members and those in pharmacy who are not yet members to make it even greater! So, I challenge all our members to recruit just one nonmember to join. Remember that membership is open to pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, and student pharmacists. My second initiative, advocacy, can be better facilitated by increasing membership. So many innovative practices require an advocate to seek public support for a cause or policy. NCAP needs your help to continue this advocacy role. In the past year we have made strides to increase our presence with advocacy. Our lobbyist, Tony Adams, has been meeting with legislators in Raleigh on our behalf. He and Executive Director Shelton have been working with the NCAP Policy and Advocacy Committee to develop a bill to improve the existing collaborative practice authority for pharmacy. The Committee has also been working on talking points to help pharmacists and others advocate for these improvements. We will be launching two initiatives in order to help members advance their practice and to assist them in the care of their patients. The first initiative is the opioid regional workshops scheduled on Sundays throughout this fall. These workshops are designed to be practical and interactive providing you with information, resources, and tools to transform your practice and better equip you to help your patients and your community. You can register for these workshops at https://www. ncpharmacists.org/calendar_list.asp. For the second initiative, NCAP has engaged in several meetings with the NC Division of Public Health (DPH) and NC Medicaid regarding advancing the role of pharmacists to provide tobacco cessation counseling. Recent meetings have addressed enabling pharmacists who complete training to bill for tobacco cessation counseling services. NCAP is currently at work using a team of pharmacists and members of the DPH Tobacco Prevention and Control Branch to develop a curriculum and service implementation training program. Our hope is to be able to bring this important training and new reimbursement payment option to pharmacists in first part of 2019. NOW I NEED TO HEAR FROM YOU! What ideas do you have for membership benefits? What can we do to promote advocacy? What changes do you want to see? How do you want to get involved? Feel free to let me know your thoughts via email at stefanie_ferreri@unc.edu or follow me on Twitter @stefanieferreri I look forward to seeing you in Winston-Salem at the NCAP Annual Convention!

Stefanie Ferreri, PharmD