Apr 11, 2018
In Part II, we talked about the goals she has for the next two years. She looks forward to working with the members of the National Executive Council to uphold the mission of APhA-ASP and integrate new ideas to continue to advance student pharmacists’ journey through the profession of pharmacy. She writes, "To navigate through pharmacy school successfully and combat the struggles of negative stress and pressure, I will work to incorporate wellness initiatives into APhA-ASP. One of the many benefits of APhA-ASP is the opportunity to connect student pharmacists, and I will work to foster communication and connection at the chapter, regional, and national level."
Full Transcript:
welcome to the pharmacy leaders podcast with your host Tony Guerra the pharmacy leaders podcast is a member of the pharmacy podcast network with interviews and advice on building your professional network craft and a purposeful second income from students residents and innovative professionals hey welcome back to the pharmacy leaders podcast I'm on with Kelly Jo welter who is the APHA ASP president-elect and I'm here talking to her about what her goals are for her presidency but also for the APHA ASP group she's incredibly collaborative and I appreciate her taking the time to come on so Kelly Jill welcome to the pharmacy leaders podcast thanks so much for having me well I wanted to go over some of the main ideas that you ran on and some of the things outside of patient care projects although we will talk about the patient care projects and we wanted to start with advocacy and policy so can you first kind of walk me through why advocacy and policy is so important but maybe it doesn't get it quite as much attention as some of the other things yeah so I think sometimes the words policy and advocacy can be a little intimidating for student pharmacists because they may not really realize what that is so you have this typical definition of policy and advocacy so going and knocking on your legislators door and asking you to talk about provider status I absolutely love that side of policy and it is definitely necessary that we're making our legislators aware of relevant legislation in pharmacy however there's this other side of advocacy that student pharmacists may already be doing that they don't even realize so just having a conversation with someone about student pharmacists being able to take someone's blood pressure or give them a vaccination or just being able to counsel them on their medications that conversation in itself is advocacy and I if we remind students that they may already be advocating for our profession just not in that traditional way that they're thinking of they may realize okay advocacy may not be as scary as I think it is and students can really dive in and work to better our profession okay we have a legislative day here in Iowa which is you know one day we all go down and we talk to our legislators but tell me more about what someone can do year-round or certainly while they're in semester as an APHA ASP member to kind of push things forward with advocacy with policy letting our legislators know what's going on because we're both Iowans and we know how many of our 99 counties are underserved medically and we know that our profession could be part of that solution so could you tell us a little bit about that so I think that first of all having a relationship with your state association and State Board of Pharmacy can really help in advocacy efforts and we have been so lucky in the state of Iowa to have that legislative day much like other states across the country and the Iowa pharmacy Association has been so great in working with students to make sure that we're aware of the current legislation and we feel comfortable talking about it with legislators and knowing what pharmacists will be able to do in the future with that legislation and as students it's so important to keep up on the current legislation and what's recently been passed and what we're looking to in the future for Pharmacy just to be aware of what's happening and what kind of practice setting we can be in and when we graduate well tell me a little bit and then we'll move on to networking so I just talked to the University of Iowa graduate who is moving to North Carolina and she moved there because of the pharmacy laws that allow her to practice at the top of her license in Iowa we have that as well and then there was a Drake grad that went out to Washington State for the same reason can you tell me a little bit about the reasons that a pharmacist would want to work in Iowa because of the privileges that they have here thinking nationally how in some places they just can't do the things that we can here in Iowa legally yeah so in Iowa we are so lucky to have a very progressive state as far as Pharma sleep pharmacy legislation coming forward the Iowa pharmacy Association is pushing for statewide protocols in the state of Iowa this legislative session which would really allow pharmacists to practice at the top of their license so across the country there are different regulations at different state levels and I was definitely working towards allowing pharmacists to practice at that top of the license well let's move on to networking and kind of how we can connect through the EM RMS and then the national meetings oh I know the national meetings I've never been to an mrm I feel like that's a confession now but I'm saying it like I said I've never been to an mrm I've only gone to the National but tell me a little bit more about mrm and why it's so important for students to go to the mrm yeah so mrm stands for mid-year regional meeting and it is the only pharmacy conference put on by student pharmacists for student pharmacist so one of my favorite things about mrm is that we are all in the same boat we're all in pharmacy school and we have pre pharmacy students attend as well which is great so I think annual is a lot of fun but I personally can get a little bit intimidated by some of the Big Shot pharmacists there and at mrm you're able to just hang out with other student pharmacists and really get to know each other during the professional meetings during the day and then during the different social events in the evening so you're learning a lot about networking and career opportunities and APHA ASP programs and structure in general and it really allows you to create those connections in the fall because mrm is held in the fall and in a few months when you get to see all your friends again at APHA annual meeting and exposition you have that opportunity to reconnect and get to see those student pharmacists from across the country more than just once a year okay well let's talk specifically about some of the networking that maybe you've done or other classmates have done let's talk about let's for example let's talk about the residency Roundtable what are those kinds of things for networking or how does networking work as far as you know where you are as a student you know whether you're early student p1 p2 vs. p3 p4 yeah so at mrm we bring in different pharmacists from the area to talk about career pathways and this allows students to really explore some unique career pathways that they may have not really talked about and those speakers are very relatable and they're very approachable and they often stick around for the entire day and student pharmacists are able to approach them and talk to them and exchange contact information and then later reach out and ask for job shadows and inquire about internships and that connection right there is so unique and then annual there's even more career opportunities presented for student pharmacists and at a lot of those speaking sessions there are pharmacists and student pharmacists there so not only are they learning about career opportunities but they might have someone on their left or on their right that's already in that practice setting so there are all these opportunities for networking and reaching out to students with career similar career interests and pharmacists that may be already practicing in that career pathway of interest for students okay so what other there's the residency round tables but I'm community pharmacists I'd always been a community pharmacist can we talk a little bit more about other networking opportunities for maybe someone that's not going to do a residency that that says okay well six years is enough it's a it's good and I'd like to start working now how do those is there anything different about the networking there or what opportunities do they have whether at mrm or national yeah absolutely so APHA ASP is a great organization and that their support for any kind of career pathway regardless of its Community Hospital industrial you name it there's an opportunity to reach out connect with people so not all the networking and all the connecting necessarily happens in speaker sessions so even just those little 15-minute breaks are in line at the coffee stand there's opportunities for student armistice to just reach out and say hi and offer their business card and there's also the exposition at Annual Meeting so students are able to walk around and talk to maybe future employers and different types of people in the pharmacy industry and be able to learn about those different types so not necessarily all of the networking happens in a formal setting but it can also happen in that casual setting as well yeah I was at the Iowa reception at APHA and it's funny people will go to a sh P and there are three layers deep in a group of ten thousand people trying to get residency's and get noticed and things like that but in this Iowa reception there were easily half a dozen or a dozen residency directors right there so it's it's it's just a tremendous opportunity I think if maybe your p3 to start kind of talking to those residency directors and there was the IPA president was there the IPA CEO the vice president was there the deans of both colleges were there so tell me a little bit about your your experience now interacting at this level because it seems like where you go there are also all of these leaders in presidential positions or Dean positions what's it what have you learned from you know that top level of leadership as you've been interacting with them yeah so I think the biggest thing that I've learned is just because they may have this fancy title there's still a human and they still put on their pants the same way every day and they're very humble and they just really want to get to know you as a student and what your interests are and what your passions are and something that is a goal of mine when I'm talking to someone is what they do outside of pharmacy because we're all there for the same reason because we love this profession but I like to get to know someone based on maybe what they do outside of pharmacy because that can really give you insight to what kind of person they are and it's fun to get to know someone that way and then the next time you see them or if you send them a handwritten thank-you card or an email after meeting them you can bring up that and that kind of sparked their mind about who you were and the kind of conversation you had because that's probably going to be different from the kinds of conversations that they may be having the entire weekend absolutely the power of the handwritten personal note yeah okay well let's let's go now to the patient care projects and talk a little bit about how a student who's interested in in patient care but maybe doesn't know what aspect of pharmacy they want how can these patient care projects kind of get them a little bit more into it and then maybe you can talk a little bit about the the diabetes track that that Drake has but certainly that aligns with one of them but maybe generally what are the patient care projects and then how students can get involved and kind of learn about future careers yeah so the five patient care projects that APHA ASP has our generation rx which is mostly going out into the community and making people aware of the dangers of prescription drug abuse and how we can prevent that so talking to students at middle schools and elementary schools and talking to students in college about their role in preventing prescription drug abuse and we've even had generation rx events like going into senior homes and hosting bingo and performing brown-bag reviews of their medications second patient care project is over-the-counter medication safety so looking at the dangers of over medicating and making people aware that just because you don't need a prescription it's still a medication and it's still something that's very important to pay attention to a third patient care project is Operation immunization and this is our longest standing patient care project and we really focus in operation immunization on educating the community on the importance of vaccinations and also going out and performing things like flu shot clinics and different events to make people aware of the vaccinations that they should be receiving for patient care project is Operation heart so a lot of operation heart events are going to be centered around hosting blood pressure screenings and blood glucose screenings and then the fifth and final patient care project is operation diabetes and actually that's the one where we're gonna focus on those blood glucose screenings more and educating people on diabetes and diabetes awareness so a lot of students are misis think that they have to be able to perform screenings to get involved and that's absolutely not true you can be involved by putting together posters and handing out waivers and just talking to patients and maybe even pointing them in the direction of the event depending on where it is so just getting out and talking to real people and real patients because you know lab practicals are great but they're not representative of realistic situations so being able to talk to patients and getting comfortable in those types of situations is so early is so important to start early on in your pharmacy school career so we really work to help pre-pharmacy students feel comfortable in getting out into the community and being involved you though they may not be able to perform more of those advanced screenings they can still get out and do something and Drake University offers the diabetes concentration so it's the concentration is one step below a minor so you would get a certificate and the diabetes concentration allows you to specialize in taking care of patients that are diabetic and it doesn't extend the pharmacy curriculum by any certain amount of time it's all weaved into the pharmacy program so this allows students to graduate with that extra kind of something to go into practice and be able to take care of those patients right away I've talked to a couple of APHA asp presidents and i'm hearing about and this is an unofficial one but it's not Operation self care but I'm hearing a lot of the chapters are kind of focusing on self care where pharmacy students will burn themselves out can you talk a little bit about the importance we talked in the previous episode about how you even though you have all these things that you do with pharmacy you make sure to have friends outside of pharmacy and participation outside of pharmacy can you tell me a little bit more about the self care initiatives that some of these chapters are doing yeah so APHA SP is a national organization and that allows chapters across the country to really mold their chapter structure to what works best for them so chapters have taken on a number of different initiatives from operation asthma to things like operation smoking cessation and programs that involve self care and one of my goals as national president-elect is to really tie in health and wellness into our daily lives in student pharmacists because professional burnout is happening more and more often and we don't want to graduate with our farm DS and practice for five years and and decide that we need a brain so I want to work on integrating different types of relaxation strategies like meditation and yoga and deep breathing techniques into meetings like mrm and APHA annual meeting and exposition to teach student pharmacists and even pharmacist these techniques that they can work on to take care of themselves and then just constantly reminding students that it's okay to take a break it's okay to take a night off and go to the kickboxing class that you've been wanting to try for a while and treat yourself to the coffee cake and just realizing that you don't have to be perfect and perfection is not expected you just have to do your best and you have to take care of yourself to be able to do your best okay well you ran on four main ideas have we covered them or there's some thing gaps that maybe we could fill in yeah so we talked a little bit about policy and advocacy and the importance of that and that's something that I really want to work on in my next two years as president-elect and then president of APHA ASP and then I just mentioned the health and wellness initiatives that I want to put into place I also think that with the patient care projects that we just talked about earlier that we should work on keeping track of our numbers as we go so right now we have chapter achievement aport reports and those are turned in at the end of the year and they summarize all the numbers of patients that we've reached out to in our events and we highlight those key events and I think it would be beneficial to turn in those numbers to APHA as we go along to be able to measure our progress and really reflect on the types of relationships that were developing with our community and making sure that they're mutually beneficial so seeing what our community needs based on the patient populations and then reflecting that in our event so we have these high quality events and even working with students of other health care professions reaching out to physical therapy students and athletic training student athletic therapy students and occupational therapy students and med students and all the like and really putting on those high quality events to take care of our patients awesome well I've asked you a ton of questions we've gone through quite a bit is there anything that I haven't asked you about that you want to make sure everybody hears I just think it's important that students are misis realized that if you're considering a leadership opportunity or going for a position or a job or anything that there's no such thing as the perfect but if opportunity comes knocking to open the door and to just do it I never thought in a million years that I would be serving in this role that I am today and it's because I had great mentors and people encouraging me to just go for it and realizing that you may not ever be 110 percent ready but taking that small positive risk can make a huge difference awesome well thanks so much for being on the pharmacy leaders podcast thank you so much for having me support for this episode comes from the audio book memorizing pharmacology a relaxed approach with over 9,000 sales in the United States United Kingdom and Australia it's the go-to resource to ease the pharmacology challenge available on audible iTunes and amazon.com in print ebook and audiobook thank you for listening to the pharmacy leaders podcast with your host Tony Guerra be sure to share the show with the hash tag hash pharmacy leaders
